...the record of history is absolutely crystal clear that there is no alternative way, so far discovered, of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by a free enterprise system.- Milton Friedman on the Phil Donahue show

"...What has always made the state a hell on earth has been precisely that man has tried to make it his heaven" -F.A. Hayek - The Road to Serfdom

The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government, are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce; with which last the power of taxation will, for the most part, be connected. The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State. -James Madison in Federalist paper #45

On every question of construction carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed.-Thomas Jefferson, 1823

To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so-Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

More Quoths

There are two reasons the left labels most conservatives and all Trump supporters white supremacists, neo-Nazis and racists. One is to defeat conservatives without having to defeat conservative ideas. The other is to instill fear: Speak out and you will suffer the consequences.  Dennis Prager

How long before a federal judge in Hawaii orders the Korean War must continue - Jack Posobiec, Author of Citizens for Trump on the news that North and South Korea were possibly ending the Korean War.

Looking back at the mass murderers of all time, Stalin, Chavez, Pol Pot, Lenin, Hitler, Castro, Kim, & Mao  you dont find any small government conservatives. You also dont find free market principal unleashing a blazing economy. You do find tyranny, socialism, famine, gun confiscation, poverty, and heros of the Democrat party. The choice between right and left couldn't be clearer. - Your's truly

 Trumps election  or, more specifically, the reaction thereto  revealed that we have been ruled by moral and intellectual failures for some time. But what they lack in competence, humility, and integrity, they make up for in self-importance and entitlement.  Glenn Reynolds, Instapundit

I dont do sneaky things. I dont leak. I dont do weasel moves. - James Comey - from the Comey memos

What is perhaps most troubling about the Departments position in this case, however, is the conceit of unlimited agency power that lies behind it. The power of a federal agency is no more than worldly. The Department should tend to what is Caesars, and leave the rest alone. ... you tell people theyre part of the alt-right when theyre not, and treat them as such no matter how much of a lie that is - Ben Shapiro tweet on the left

None of my liberal friends invite me to dinner anymore. Thanks to Donald Trump, Ive lost seven pounds. I call it the Donald Trump diet. - Alan Dershowitz on his social ostracization by the left for his sometimes agreeing with Trump

its not that the policy didnt work; its that we need more of it!  the 2016 election seems to have proven to liberals not that their shift in principles was wrong, but that they didnt shift enough, because they didnt realize just how powerful the hateful, mystical forces arrayed against them really were. -Oliver Traldi

" ... self-serious, self-righteous, angry-faced harridans who want to destroy you for disagreeing with them. They call you names, they shout you down, they riot if you try to speak, they try to get you fired or run you out of business"- Andrew Klaven, PJ Media, on the modern Democrat Party.

Common sense can be more readily expected when writing for the general public than when writing for the intelligentsia.-Thomas Sowell

When we start relying totally on the government for not just our primary education but for college education as well, we give the government our tacit agreement to let it tell us what we should study and what our career field should be -Sarah Hoyt

There is no serious person out there who would suggest that you could even rig America's elections, in part because they are so decentralized. There is no evidence that that has happened in the past, or that there are instances that that could happen this time - Barack Obama on the 2016 election

It provides evidence that Steele was getting information from the Clinton team itself! Via the State Department! So now, not only do we have a dossier based on unnamed shady Russians, but on Sidney Blumenthal. How much of this was engineered by the Clinton campaign from start? -Kim Strassel Tweet after the Grassley memo release, Feb 2018

The danger is that the media is largely controlled by people who are so committed to a dead statist ideology that they are willing to ignore objective facts and contradict themselves on a day-to-day basis in order to participate in what amounts to a coup attempt against a duly elected President. -David Catron, Am Spect., Feb, 2018

I am being investigated for firing the FBI Director by the man who told me to fire the FBI Director! -Pres. Donald Trump Tweet - Jun '17

On numerous occasions the [Obama] intelligence community incidentally collected information about U.S. citizens involved in the Trump transition. Details about U.S. persons associated with the incoming administration; details with little or no apparent foreign intelligence value were widely disseminated in intelligence community reporting. I want to be clear; none of this surveillance was related to Russia, or the investigation of Russian activities. - Rep. Nunes, March '17

One reason many Americans dont trust the media is because they treat every Donald Trump outburst as a Defcon 1 level threat to the survival of the republic. - Wall St. Journal Ed., Jan '18.

Weve reached a point at which senators are threatening to understaff the executive if the executive doesnt decline to enforce the laws over which senators have control. - Charles Cooke commenting on Rep. Sen Cory Gardner threatening to hold DOJ nominees until Attorney General Sessions backs off on federal marijuana law enforcement.

But most ideas are probably bad; certainly 90% of ideas arent in the top 10%.-Glenn Reynolds

... if a sitting president used the instruments of state, including the intelligence community, to disseminate and legitimize a piece of paid opposition research in order to first obtain warrants to spy on the other partys campaign, and then to de-legitimize the results of an election once the other partys candidate won, were looking at a scandal that dwarfs Watergatea story not about a bad man in the White House, but about the subversion of key security institutions that are charged with protecting core elements of our democratic process while operating largely in the shadows. -Lee Smith, Tablet Mag. on the GPS Fusion dossier

If Trump likes something, Rubin doesnt. If he does something, she opposes it. If his agenda flits into alignment with hersas anyones is wont to do from time to time 1;she either ignores it, or finds a way to downplay i t. The result is farcical and sad; a comprehensive and self-inflicted airbrushing of the mind. - Charles Cooke taking down the Washington Posts "conservative" blogger, Jennifer Rubin for intellectual dishonesty.

Well, it starts in the home. If the father is not in the home, the boy will find a father in the streets. I saw it in my generation and every generation before me and every one since. If the streets raise you, then the judge becomes your mother and prison becomes your home.  Denzel Washington when asked about the plight of the black community.

Todays identity politics . . . teaches the exact opposite of what we think a liberal arts education should be. When I was at Yale in the 1980s, I was given so many tools for understanding the world. By the time I graduated, I could think about things as a utilitarian or as a Kantian, as a Freudian or a behaviorist, as a computer scientist or as a humanist. I was given many lenses to apply to any given question or problem.

But what do we do now? Many students are given just one lenspower. Heres your lens, kid. Look at everything through this lens. Everything is about power. Every situation is analyzed in terms of the bad people acting to preserve their power and privilege over the good people. This is not an education. This is induction into a cult. Its a fundamentalist religion. Its a paranoid worldview that separates people from each other and sends them down the road to alienation, anxiety and intellectual impotence. . . .

Jonathan Haidt, The Age of Outrage: What Its Doing to Our Universities, and Our Country.

asking lefties to be grateful is humiliating and degrading The left is a movement built on resentment. And resentment and gratitude are opposing emotions. Daniel Greenfield, Frontpage, on why the left hates Thanksgiving.

Every day, it is a joy to awaken, unlike Hillary Clinton, without a hangover. Oh yes, and also to awaken knowing that Felonia von Pantsuit is not, and will never be, our president. Can you imagine if she were? She is as vindictive as she is stupid. - KURT SCHLICHTER, Nov, 2017

... what they did instead  turning their party into an accessory to Clintons appetites, shamelessly abandoning feminist principle, smearing victims and blithely ignoring his most credible accuser, all because Republicans funded the investigations and theyre prudes and its all just Sexual McCarthyism  feels in the cold clarity of hindsight like a great act of partisan deformation. - Ross Douthat, On the Democrat acceptance of Clinton behavior. Nov. , 2017 NY Times

Wear socks depicting police officers as pigs; wear Fidel Castro as a fashion statement IN MIAMI; sue NFL for collusion when gf compares owners to slave owners Win Citizen of the Year, -- Serve in the US Military nothing. What a joke, GQ. - former ESPN reporter Britt McHenry tweeting when GQ magazine released its special issue naming former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick Citizen of the Year.

Todays ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters  speaking the in language  serves as a badge of identity. - Angelo Codevilla, The Ruling Class

A friend likens The New York Times to a 1960s adolescent who refuses to grow up. In a perpetual state of outrage, it is a newspaper of college snowflakes who embrace all forms of diversity except thought. It sees its liberal politics not as a point of view, but as received wisdom that cannot be legitimately disputed. - NY Post's Michael Goodwin

Two of the more repugnant Americans today are the moral narcissist judges from Maryland (Theodore Chuang) and Hawaii (Derrick Watson) who tried to upend Donald Trump's travel ban. The fact is the travel ban is insufficient, not illegal - R Simon, PJ Media, Nov 1, 2017

"Everyone is colluding with Russia except Trump!"- Mark Steyn

religious beliefs need not be acceptable, logical, consistent, or comprehensible to others in order to merit First Amendment protection  Supreme Court, Thomas v. Review Board

That our progressive friends often are so pristinely ignorant of the moral order underpinning the American founding is one of their great intellectual failures. They do not understand the American idea, and, as a result, they do not really understand their own ideas, either. - KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON, Our 21st-Century Second Amendment

I, for one, am not super inclined to give up my ability to defend myself in response to demands by people who eagerly tell me they want me enslaved or dead. Literally dead. - Kurt Schlichter, Townhall, 2017 on liberal gun control demands

if Republicans didnt have Democrats to run against, theyd lose every time. -Bill Whittle

There is absolutely nothing that so defines Leftism as anger... Converse or correspond with anyone on the Left long enough and it becomes obvious that they are just plan mad, especially at people who do not agree that they just know better than you do. So their commentary is, smug, predictable, dismissive, with all of the subtlety, wit, and artistry of a sledgehammer. You either agree with them altogether or you are painted as a racist, homophobic, neo-Nazi, fundamentalist Christian, white supremacist, misogynist child of darkness. Who hates the government except in hurricanes. -Ed Morrisey, Hot Air

Capitalism is revolutionary. Communism and socialism isnt revolutionary. Its just another form of autocracy of centralized government control over the individual- Mark Levin, Aug 2017

Democrats hate Voter ID. Its one of their biggest issues. But thats ridiculous. Voter ID is a no-brainer. You need an ID to do most anything: cash a check, buy cigarettes or alcohol, get food stamps, or get any government benefits. You even need ID to get into government buildings! So why are Democrats so intense and passionate about such a minor issue? Me thinks thou protesteth too much. This is a much bigger issue than meets the naked eye. Democrats are losing their minds over Voter ID because they know they cant win elections without fraud. - Wayne Allyn Root, 2014

The Resistance so far has been less a call to rebuild Washington than the scream of someone having his leg amputated without anesthesia. - Richard Fernadez, PJ Media on the left's reaction to Trump. July, 2017

The two major enemies of a free society are businesses and intellectuals. Every businessman is in favor of freedom for everyone else but want special privileges for himself and every academic is in favor of freedom for himself but wants to control everybody else. - Milton Friedman

No matter who you are or what you do, there are always tens of millions of liberals who believe they have a better idea of what you should be thinking, feeling and spending your money on. Of course, that sense of smug superiority coupled with the disastrous results of liberal policies would almost be comical, except for the destruction in real peoples lives that is left in the wake of liberal policies. - John Hawkins

The presumed irrationality of the public is a pattern running through many, if not most or all, of the great crusades of (liberals) in the twentieth centuryregardless of the subject matter of the crusade or the field in which it arises. Whether the issue has been overpopulation, Keynesian economics, criminal justice, or natural resource exhaustion, a key assumption has been that the public is so irrational that the superior wisdom of (liberals) must be imposed, in order to avert disaster. The (liberals) do not simply happen to have a disdain for the public. Such disdain is an integral part of their vision, for the central feature of that vision is preemption of the decisions of others.-Thomas Sowell

Civilization has been aptly called a thin crust over a volcano. (Liberals) are constantly picking at that crust. - Thomas Sowell

The problem is power. The solution is democracy. The course of action is to foster freedom.  R.J. Rummels solution to mega murders by governments.

Marginalized students perversely pursue equality by pulling groups perceived as privileged down. Privileged students are chastised for committing microaggressions against their marginalized peers, while marginalized students are free to commit blatant acts of racial or gender bias against those they deem privileged. -Steven Glick, editor-in-chief of the student newspaper Claremont Independent commenting on the PC crowd

The problem wasnt mismanagement of Venezuelas economy, it was management of the economy by the Chavez and Maduro regimes. Anyone who thinks a government can manage an economy is a fool. There is hardly any difference between management and mismanagement; the most brilliant managers would have performed only marginally better than Chavez and Maduro, if they were socialists or anything similar. - John Hinderaker, Powerline

Democrats are completely focused on placating their frothing, left-wing, anti-Trump base  and the American heartland thinks these people are insane. They see women marching in anti-Trump rallies wearing pussy hats (and placing them on the heads of young children). They see left-wing mobs attacking Charles Murray at Middlebury College and trying to stop Ann Coulter from speaking at the University of California at Berkeley. They see Bill Nye the Liberal Guy  honorary co-chair of the March for Science  raising a question about whether people should be punished for having extra kids. (Which of their kids, they wonder, is the extra one?) They see a horrible feedback loop of left-wing intolerance for their beliefs and way of life. And they see Democrats in Washington pandering to these people.

- Marc Thiessen, The past 100 days have been a disaster  for Democrats. WAPO, May, 2017

This farrago of nonsense and garbage is a disgrace to the person who wrote it, the editors and publishers who produced it, and the ideological fools who endorsed it. The only reason to discuss it at any length is to expose its mendacity as an antidote to anyone who has the misfortune to read it. - Harvey Klehr, the Mellon professor of politics at Emory University, concluding a book review of Alger Hiss Framed: A New Look at the Case That Made Nixon Famous

He can lead a protest. Im leading a country. Theresa May in the House of Commons squashing the anti-Trump Corbyn (Labour Party)

... the inhabitants of the swamp are in what one commentator referred to as an existential struggle. Their jobs are at risk. ... what Donald J. Trump is up against: [is] a bureaucratic machine that fully intends to catch him in its cogs and grind him to political death. Its denizens will stop at nothing, because for them, to lose this battle is worse than death; it is to be exposed as the irrelevant, purposeless creatures they have become. - Robert Arvay, Jan 2017

There is a presumption that heartlessness and bigotry are somehow endemic to conservatism, that the rigors of freedom and capitalism literally require exploitation and inequalitythis despite the fact that so many liberal policies since the 1960s have only worsened the inequalities they sought to overcome-Shelby Steele

The conceit behind this hectoring is that Progressives are free to talk down to others, but non-Progressives dont possess the same right. -Richard Samuelson on the cast of Hamilton talking down to Mike Pence

How symbolic! What could be more fitting, given the broken down nature of the antique Cuban state produced by Castro? - Powerline's Paul Mirengoff after the hearse carrying Fidel Castros remains during his funeral parade broke down and soldiers had to push it through the streets. Dec, 2016

All progressives, Communists included, claim to be about creating new human realities, they are perpetually at war against natures laws and limits. But since reality does not yield, progressives end up pretending that they themselves embody those new realities. Hence, any progressive movements nominal goal eventually ends up being subordinated to the urgent, all-important question of the movements own power. Because that power is insecure as long as others are able to question the truth of what the progressives say about themselves and the world, progressive movements end up struggling not so much to create the promised new realities as to force people to speak and act as if these were real: as if what is correct politically -- i.e., what thoughts serve the partys interest -- were correct factually. - Angelo Codevilla

Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them. ... The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. - Former slave Frederick Douglass

Its no exaggeration to say that this double standard amounts to a profound moral rot in our politics. I dont need to cite chapter and verse about how the profoundly peaceful and law-abiding Tea Party movement was treated as a proto-fascist army of vigilantes while the Occupy movement was seen as a heartwarming expression of authentic people power. Never mind that violence was far more endemic to the Occupy movement. Left-wing youth, particularly minority youth, who threaten and intimidate people and destroy property, are seen as expressing their righteous passion. Right-wing youth who do likewise are terrifying harbingers of fascism and authoritarianism. -Jonah Goldberg after left wing mob violence aat a Trump rally

The Democrats have their own super PAC, it's called the mainstream media. -Marco Rubio in the Oct 2015 Republican debate

... Socialism is founded on a doctrine of human society which is bounded by time and takes no account of any objective other than that of material well-being. Since, therefore, it proposes a form of social organization which aims solely at production; it places too severe a restraint on human liberty, at the same time flouting the true notion of social authority. - Pope John XXIII , Radio message to the Katholikentag of Vienna, September 14, 1952 in Discorsi e Radiomessaggi, Vol. XIV, p. 314

Libby was in an Orwellian position of being accused of a crime that may not have existed. But if it had, it was more likely committed by someone else. - Victor Davis Hanson, on Scooter Libby's run in with the Justice Dept's special prosecutor

There are no rational means of predicting the future of humanity over a long period or foretelling the nature of social formations in ages to come. The idea that we can make such forecasts scientifically, and that without doing so we cannot understand the past, is inherent in the Marxist theory of social formations; it is one reason why the theory is a fantasy, and also why it is politically effective. The influence that Marxism has achieved, for from being the result or proof of its scientific character, is almost entirely due to its prophetic, fantastic, and irrational elements. Marxism is a doctrine of blind confidence that a paradise of universal satisfaction is awaiting us just around the corner. -Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism

... a normalization of sexual experimentation, a devaluation of marriage (especially as the key to successful child rearing) and a destigmatization of illegitimacy, a fad for drugs and for dropping out of the workaday world, a disdain for authority, a belief that black criminality was a natural rebellion against racism and exclusion, and that, in reparation for 300 years of racial injustice, welfare payments ought to be raised and handed out freely, without any hint of disapprovalall these changes in morals, manners, and beliefs quickly filtered down to the inner-city poor and produced an explosion in drug use, crime, nonwork, welfare dependency, and illegitimacy. -Myron Magnate, Aug, 2015 on the result of the left's policies in the 70's

There are four ways in which you can spend money. You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what youre doing, and you try to get the most for your money. Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then Im not so careful about the content of the present, but Im very careful about the cost. Then, I can spend somebody elses money on myself. And if I spend somebody elses money on myself, then Im sure going to have a good lunch! Finally, I can spend somebody elses money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody elses money on somebody else, Im not concerned about how much it is, and Im not concerned about what I get. And thats government. And thats close to 40% of our national income.-Milton Friedman

The Roberts Doctrine facilitates what has been for a century progressivism's central objective, which is the overthrow of the Constitution's architecture. -George Will, 2015, on the Supreme Courts ruling on Obamacare

Above (an innumerable crowd of similar and equal men) arises an immense and tutelary power that alone takes charge of assuring their enjoyment and of looking after their fate. It works willingly for their happiness; but it wants to be the unique agent for it and the sole arbiter; it attends to their security, provides for their needs, facilitates their pleasures, conducts their principal affairs, directs their industry, settles their estates, divides their inheritances, how can it not remove entirely from them the trouble to think and the difficulty of living? - Alexis De Tocqueville

Phil Donahue: When you see around the globe the maldistribution of wealth, the desperate plight of millions of people in underdeveloped countries, when you see so few haves and so many have-nots, when you see the greed and the concentration of power, did you ever have a moment of doubt about capitalism and whether greeds a good idea to run on?

Milton Friedman: Well, first of all, tell me, is there some society you know that doesnt run on greed? You think Russia doesnt run on greed? You think China doesnt run on greed? What is greed? Of course none of us are greedy. Its only the other fellow whos greedy. The world runs on individuals pursuing their separate interests. The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus. Einstein didnt construct his theory under order from a bureaucrat. Henry Ford didnt revolutionize the automobile industry that way. In the only cases in which the masses have escaped from the kind of grinding poverty youre talking about, the only cases in recorded history are where they have had capitalism and largely free trade. If you want to know where the masses are worst off, its exactly in the kinds of societies that depart from that. So that the record of history is absolutely crystal clear that there is no alternative way, so far discovered, of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by a free enterprise system.

Donahue: But it seems to reward not virtue as much as ability to manipulate the system.

Friedman: And what does reward virtue? . . . I think youre taking a lot of things for granted. Just tell me where in the world you find these angels who are going to organize society for us.

- From an interview with economist Milton Friedman by television talk-show host Phil Donahue in 1979

How has liberal guilt shaped stories that he has written and delivered on the economy; on taxes; on wages; on corporate profits; on fiscal policy; on race relations; on affirmative action; and on many other subjects NBC News has addressed over the years?-Powerline's John Hinderaker on Brian Williams after the anchor recanted his fabricated story of his helicopter being downed by RPG in Iraq

Did you know he was grazed by the very same bullet that struck Pope John Paul II in 1981 in Vatican Square? - Michelle Malkin tweet when Brian Williams returned to TV covering Pope Francis' US visit.

These stories about the killings of African-American men by police officers (or by a neighborhood watch captain, in Trayvon Martins case) are all what my long-time radio and podcast partner Brian Ward calls stories of choice. They are plucked from a nearly endless supply of sad events that occur daily in a nation of 315 million, and are promoted because they further a political narrative. An unholy alliance of activists and newspaper reporters and editors tries to distort our perception of reality by giving undue emphasis to them. Then, of course, reality begins to catch up with perception, and we have riots, murders of police officers, and so on. But understand that the decision to promote these stories, in preference to others that are equally or more newsworthy, is a choice that is consciously made by people with a political agenda. -John Hinderaker, Powerline Dec 2014.

The guilt that is always part of the liberal syndrome swells painfully when liberals gain power and find that the worlds sorrows show no tendency to vanish at their sovereign touch-James Burnham in Suicide of the West

[Socialism is ] a state in which a person who has not committed any crime sits at home waiting for the police, in which there are more spies than nurses and more people in prisons than in hospitals, in which one is forced to resort to lies...in which a person who does not think at all lives better -- and which wants all citizens to have the same opinions in philosophy, economics, literature, and ethics, in which the philosopher and writers always say the same thing as the generals and ministers, but always after them, in which one must each day refute what one affirmed the day before and always believe it to be the same. -Prof Leszek Kolakowski, in one of his essays entitled "What is Socialism?"

How did our national government grow from a servant with sharply limited powers into a master with virtually unlimited power?  Senator Barry Goldwater writing in The Conscience of a Conservative (1960)

College was once about preparing boys and girls to become men and women, not least through a process of desensitization to discomfiting ideas. Now it's just a $240,000 extension of kindergarten. Wall St. Journal's Bret Stephens column in a faux commencement address to the Class of 2014 discussing trigger warnings - May, 2014

Taxing the rich to redistribute did not produce growth. On the contrary, growth reduced the share earned by the highest earners.-Allan Meltzer, of the Hoover Institute commenting on Obama and the liberals having it backwards.

He just looked at me. - Walter Williams on the reaction of a Food and Drug Administration official after asking him if he would accept grossly dishonest statistical techniques as were used by the EPA to determine secondhand smoke conclusions.

[D]oes income generally grow faster for people in the lowest fifth of the population or people in the highest? It's the lowest, because many of those people are young, low-paid people just starting out on their careers, while many of the richest fifth are older people at the peak of their pay, about to retire. That is to say, the category "poorest fifth" may not seem to show much change, but the people in it do. Income mobility is far from dead: 80 per cent of people born in households below the poverty line escape poverty when they reach adulthood.

None of this is meant to imply that people are wrong to resent inequality in income or wealth, or be bothered about the winner-take-all features of executive pay in recent decades. Indeed, my point is rather the reverse: to try to understand why it is that people mind so much today, when in many ways inequality is so much less acute, and absolute poverty so much less prevalent, than it was in, say, 1900 or 1950. Now that starvation and squalor are mostly avoidable, so what if somebody else has a yacht?

-Matt Ridley writing in the Times of London, Feb. 6, 2014

To be a conservative is first to understand that there is no solution to the dilemmas of the human condition. Second, it is to understand that to escape these dilemmas, human beings will inevitably embark on desperate quests for redemptions in this life. These redemptions, in turn, will require holy wars to purge the world of demonsof those who do not share their faith, and who stand in their way. In this regard, totalitarian Islam is really no different in its heart from totalitarian socialism or progressivism, even though the latter are secular and the former is pursued in the name of a vengeful and malignant God. Both seek to cleanse mankind of its irreparable imperfections.

To remain free beings, we are continually forced to defend ourselves and our breathing space, against the efforts of the redeemers to perfect usagainst the armies of the saints who are determined to make the world a better place than it can ever be. That is how I see the political wars we face, and why they will never end.

-David Horowitz:in the "The Black Book of the American Left" (2013)

It should win the contest both because of its purity -- no contaminating speck of truth -- and because of how many people have repeated it over the years, without any evidence being asked for or given.-Thomas Sowell assigning top contender status for the biggest lie in politics (in this case from NY Mayor de Blasio)

None of the usual political language applies here. Alexis, who killed twelve people, did not buy a weapon from a friend or over the Internet or in the parking lot of a gun show; he did not have a high capacity magazine from which to spray bullets around; he did not buy a military style assault weapon  nor even use one; he did not deploy armor-piercing bullets. Instead, he bought a shotgun, which almost nobody is openly suggesting should be banned or controlled. Politicians and public figures who call for new laws in the wake of this shooting will thus need nailing to the wall with a simple and reliable question: What exactly do you propose doing, and how specifically would it have changed what happened at the Navy Yard? When I have asked this question of non-journalists on Twitter, I have received a common  refreshingly honest  answer: A gun ban. - C Cooke on the 2013 Navy Yard shootings by A Alexis

while documenting the destruction after a night of rioting in the Stockholm suburb of Alby, a reporter from Fria Tider observed a parking enforcement officer writing a ticket for a burnt-out Ford. When questioned, the officer explained that the ticket was issued because the vehicle lacked a tag showing its time of arrival.

- From an artilce by Tom Burns of NewsBusters referring to how police stood passively by in Muslim rioting so as to not get stoned, while some services (parking tickets) went on as usual.

In Britain in the Seventies, everything that could be nationalized had been nationalized, into a phalanx of lumpen government monopolies all flying the moth-eaten flag: British Steel, British Coal, British Airways, British Rail . . . The government owned every industry  or, if you prefer, the British people owned every industry. And, as a consequence, the unions owned the British people. The top income-tax rate was 83 percent, and on investment income 98 percent. No electorally viable politician now thinks the government should run airlines and car plants and that workers should live their entire lives in government housing. But what seems obvious to all in 2013 was the bipartisan consensus four decades ago, and it required an extraordinary political will for one woman to drag her own party, then the nation, and subsequently much of the rest of the world back from the cliff edge. -National Review's Mark Steyn on Margeret Thatcher after her passing.

I do not believe that the preferential option for the poor means a preferential option for big government- Rep. Paul Ryan, 2012

A repressive regime lies, and suppresses voices telling the truth. Hearing only its own propaganda, the regime starts believing it. When its policies fail in the real world or at the ballot box, it blames the dissidents and other enemies of the people, and attempts to ramp up the repressions. With each cycle, the beliefs of the regime move further away from reality, suspicions of conspiracy grow stronger, and the desire to repress the real or imaginary opposition overrides any remnants of common sense. This happened in the former Soviet Union. to the Western institutions which had fallen victims to the New Left. The former Democratic Party seems to have become one of these institutions. - Art Halperin, Am. Thinker, July 2017

Beneath the allegedly young idealism [of Occupy Wall Street] are very cobwebbed assumptions about societal permanence. The agitators for "American Autumn" think that such demands are reasonable for no other reason than that they happen to have been born in America, and expectations that no other society in human history has ever expected are just part of their birthright. But a society can live on the accumulated capital of a glorious inheritance only for so long. And, in that sense, this bloodless, insipid revolution is just a somewhat smellier front for the sclerotic status quo.

Middle-class America is dying before our eyes: The job market is flat-lined, college fees soar ever upward, the property market is underwater, and ObamaCare is already making medical provision both more expensive and more restrictive. That doesn't leave much elsealthough no doubt, as soon as they find something else, the statists will fix that, too. As more and more middle Americans are beginning to notice, they lead more precarious and vulnerable lives than did their blue-collar parents and grandparents without the benefit of college "education" and health "benefits." For poorer Americans, the prospects are even glummer, augmented by ever-grimmer statistics on obesity, childhood diabetes and much else. Potentially, this is not decline, but a swift devastating downward slide, far beyond what post-war Britain and Europe saw and closer to Peronist Argentina on a Roman scale.

It would be heartening if more presidential candidates understood the urgency. But there is a strange lack of boldness in most of their proposals. They, too, seem victims of that 1950 moment, and assumptions of its permanence. -Mark Steyn in the Orange County Register, Oct. 14, 2011

... conservative presidents may be derided as stupid, but somehow they keep having successful presidencies. Liberal presidents, on the other hand, may be praised as brilliant, but somehow they keep failing. The explanation, of course, is simple: conservative policies work, and liberal policies dont.-John Hinderaker in Conservatism

"It's not your store! Why do you care?" Shouts from a crowd with some onlookers threatening the AutoZone staffers for daring to run down and tackle a shoplifter - NY Post, Aug 2011

Indeed, one of the reasons the Tea Parties are so "outrageously" intransigent and uncompromising is that they've seen what compromise has gotten in the past-Jonah Goldberg, Jul 2011

Its a liberal town, and the essence of liberalism as I understand it, in its aspect of being a religion, is that you have to protect the lie. Liberal turned Conservative Playwrite David Mamet on Hollywood

...his own behavior was so in tune with the ethos of the institution. Here is a place where power can be exercised without electoral accountability, privileges can be enjoyed without scrutiny, salaries can be claimed without taxes, and other people's money can be spent with abandon. -Wall St. Journal Ed. on Dominique Strauss-Kahn and the IMF

They often claim to be morally superior to others because they do not believe they are morally superior to others. Columnist Mike Adams on tolerant libs, May '11

"....the most predictable crisis in the history of our country" Rep Paul Ryan on the future unsustainable Federal spending.

... there is one person in government whom I despise so utterly that mere mention of his name makes me spew all over the page. My poor reasonable readers all scurry for cover in fear of getting acid burns from my invective.....This man does for Judaism what Harry Reid does for Mormonism: portray it as the province of selfish, grasping, conniving leeches who are willing to bulldoze the moral edifice the Founders built... he is the Bernie Madoff of moral capital. He got all the Orthodox Jews to invest their moral capital with him and he cleaned them out....Until he leaves public office, I will never be fully able to accept the model of government as a force for good. Columnist Jay D. Homnick on Sen. Chuck Shumer

To progressives, the best thing about railroads is that people riding them are not in automobiles, which are subversive of the deference on which progressivism depends. Automobiles go hither and yon, wherever and whenever the driver desires, without timetables. Automobiles encourage people to think theyunsupervised, untutored, and unscriptedare masters of their fates. The automobile encourages people in delusions of adequacy, which make them resistant to government by experts who know what choices people should make. - George Will on the liberals' fascination with trains, Feb 2011

Meticulous attention should be paid to the special relations and obligations of public servants to the public itself and to the Government .The process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. ... [a] strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to obstruct the operations of government until their demands are satisfied. Such action looking toward the paralysis of government by those who have sworn to support it is unthinkable and intolerable. - liberal icon FDR in 1937

For today's left, the main goal of politics is not to respond to public opinion. The goal is to impose the dream of an egalitarian entitlement state whether the public likes it or not. Sooner or later, they figure, the anger will subside and Americans will come to like the cozy confines of the cradle-to-grave welfare state-Wall St Jurnal Editorial on the work of the 111th Congress, Dec 31, 2010.

Although the Founders provided a method to amend the nation's governing document, activists preferred to take a judicial short-cut. Judges liked the idea of making law and began treating the constitutional text as advisory. This turned the Supreme Court into a sort of continuing constitutional convention, with new amendments routinely enacted with just five votes.-Cato Institute's Doug Bandow, Dec 2010.

There are better solutions than giving up your freedom. You can't get that back-Virginia Attorney General Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, who brought and won the case against Obamacare, Dec 2010.

Let me help you pack - NJ Gov. Chris Christie told one of the states top administrators when that administrator commented publicly that he could leave New Jersey and go to another state if his $242,000 total compensation were to be capped under the governors proposed rule, Nov 2010

These ideas, are almost exclusively about how other people should live their lives. These are ideas about how one group of people (the politically successful) should engineer everyone else's contracts, social relations, diets, habits, and even moral sentiments. These are ideas about replacing an unimaginably large multitude of diverse and competing ideas . . . with a relatively paltry set of 'Big Ideas' that are politically selected, centrally imposed, and enforced by government, not by the natural give, take and compromise of the everyday interactions of millions of people. -Don Boudreaux, economist at George Mason University, on liberalism

In California, the people can pass a ballot proposition, but a single activist judge overrules them. In Arizona, the peoples representatives vote to uphold the peoples laws, but a pliant judge strikes them down at Washingtons behest. It is surely only a matter of time before some federal judge finds the constitution unconstitutional. -Mark Steyn, Nov 2010

On Feb. 7, 2009, the cover of Newsweek magazine proclaimed, "We Are All Socialists Now." Since then, much has transpired, including the sale of Newsweek to the highest bidder for $1. Now, 1 1/2 years later, a more poignant cover story might be "We Are All Tea Partiers Now." -By Doug Mainwaring, The Washington Times Oct 2010

Pick at random any three letters from the alphabet, put them in any order, and you will have an acronym designating a federal agency we can do without. -Milton Friedman

"... a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery." -Winston Churchill on socialism

The Constitution preserves the advantage of being armed which Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation where the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms. James Madison

The substance of the eminent Socialist gentleman's speech is that making a profit is a sin, but it is my belief that the real sin is taking a loss --Winston Churchill

"For a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle." --Winston Churchill

"How a politician stands on the Second Amendment tells you how he or she views you as an individual... as a trustworthy and productive citizen, or as part of an unruly crowd that needs to be lorded over, controlled, supervised, and taken care of." -- Suzanna Hupp

"Since the general civilization of mankind, I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachment of those in power, than by violent and sudden usurpations." --James Madison to the Virginia Convention, 1788

"Democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover they can vote themselves largesse out of the public treasure. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefit from the public treasury, with the result that democracy always collapses over a loose fiscal policy, always to be followed by a dictatorship, and then a monarchy." --Alexander Tytler

"If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand." --Milton Friedman "Some of you in this room support higher taxes. I welcome your enthusiasm and am glad to report that the IRS takes both money orders and checks. " --George W Bush

"The siren song of redistribution of wealth by centralized government never ceases for those who seek irreversible and unusurpable control over the lives and liberties of private citizens." --Josh Jones

"Anyone who robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on the support of Paul." --George Bernard Shaw

Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it. -Thomas Sowell

There is only one guaranteed way to get fired from the Department of Veterans Affairs. Falsifying records won't do it. Prescribing obsolete drugs won't do it. Cutting all manner of corners on health and safety is, at worst, going to get you a reprimand. No, the only sure-fire way to get canned at the VA is to report any of these matters to authorities who might do something about it. - Jonah Goldberg, Sept 2015.

Liberals don't care what you do so long as it's compulsory -William F. Buckley

You all know the one product that since Soviet times has become more affordable: It's vodka. This is why the only thing that is guaranteed to all of us is degradation and drinking ourselves to death. -Alexei Navalny, the leader of Russia's opposition to Vladimir Putin.

From a conservative perspective, telling people how to run their lives when not absolutely necessary is an abuse of power. For liberals, telling people how to run their lives is one of the really fun perks of working for the government.-Jonah Goldberg, Nov 2013

Perhaps, at first, prejudice, habit, shame or fear, principle or religion, would restrain the poor from attacking the rich, and the idle from usurping on the industrious; but the time would not be long before courage and enterprise would come, and pretexts be invented by degrees, to countenance the majority in dividing all the property among them, or at least, in sharing it equally with its present possessors. Debts would be abolished first; taxes laid heavily on the rich, and not at all on the others; and at last a downright equal division of everything be demanded, and voted. What would be the consequence of this? The idle, the vicious, the intemperate would rush into the utmost extravagance of debauchery, sell and spend their share, and then demand a new division of those who purchased from them. -John Adams

Lennon's utopia is our dystopia. A world without God to give people some certitude that all their suffering is not meaningless is a nightmare. A world without religion means a world without any systematic way of ennobling people. A world without countries is a world without the United States of America, and it is a world governed by the morally imbecilic United Nations, where mass murderers sit on its "human rights" councils. A world without heaven or hell is a world without any ultimate justice, where torturers and their victims have identical fates -- oblivion. A world without possessions is a world in which some enormous state possesses everything, and the individual is reduced to the status of a serf.-Dennis Prager on John Lennon's song, "Imagine"

Most Western governments hate me smoking, or eating the wrong kind of food, or hunting foxes, or drinking too much, and these are merely the surface disapprovals, the ones that provoke legislation or public campaigns. We also borrow too much money for our personal pleasures, and many of us are very bad parents. Ministers of state have been known to instruct us in elementary matters, such as the importance of reading stories to our children. Again, many of us have unsound views about people of other races, cultures, or religions, and the distribution of our friends does not always correspond, as governments think that it ought, to the cultural diversity of our society. We must face up to the grim fact that the rulers we elect are losing patience with us. . . . Some may forgive these intrusions because they are so well intentioned. Who would defend prejudice, debt, or excessive drinking? The point, however, is that our rulers have no business telling us how to live. . . . We might perhaps be more tolerant of rulers turning preachers if they were moral giants. But what citizen looks at the government today thinking how wise and virtuous it is? -Kenneth Minogue in the June 2010 issue of The New Criterion

The emerging Tea Party nation understands that the media has focused on the manufactured racial schism while intentionally ignoring the schism between free market thinkers and government expansionists, that the latter of which is brazen in its desire to transform America into a European-model welfare state with a healthy dose of socialism.-Andrew Breitbar's intro when presenting a tape of USDA's Shirley Sherrod's racist remarks to the NAACP.

When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.-Ben Franklin

Just saying the magic word "change" does not justify judges grabbing the power to make whatever changes they please in the law. There are, after all, two other branches of the federal government, specifically charged with legislative and executive responsibilities and powers, not to mention the Constitutional Amendment process -Thomas Sowell on Supreme Court Justice Stevens' view that the society is evolving and therefore the interpretation of the Constitution must evolve with it. May, 2010.

You might think that being a Supreme Court justice would be the top of the line job for someone in the legal profession. But, many Supreme Court decisions suggest that too many justices are not satisfied with their role, and seek more sweeping powers as supreme policy-makers, grand second-guessers or philosopher-kings. -Thomas Sowell, 2010

... one has to wonder: Is the objection to the law that it won't work, or that it will? -Jonah Goldberg on the left's criticism of Arizona's 2010 immigration law.

The Constitution is a limitation on the government, not on private individuals ... it does not prescribe the conduct of private individuals, only the conduct of the government ... it is not a charter for government power, but a charter of the citizen's protection against the government.-Ayn Rand

Resentments and hostility toward people with higher achievements are one of the most widespread of human failings...In our own times, especially, this is not just a spontaneous reaction. Many of our educators, our intelligentsia and our media -- not to mention our politicians-- promote an attitude that other people's achievements are grievances, rather than examples. -T Sowell, 2010

...the phenomenon of a federal government that seemed less and less competent attempting to do more and more by passing bigger and bigger laws...Add to this states on the verge of bankruptcy, the looming debt crisis of the federal government, and the likelihood of ever-rising taxes. Shake it all together, and you have the makings of the big alienation. Alienation is often followed by full-blown antagonism, and antagonism by breakage.-Peggy Noonan, 2010.

The Obama/Clinton/media left are comfortable with the unrest in our society today. It allows them to blame and demonize their opponents (doctors, insurance companies, Wall Street, talk radio, Fox News) in order to portray their regime as the great healer of all our ills, thus expanding their power and control over our society-Rush Limbaugh, Apr 2010

Democrats, controlled by unions, want Latinos to vote but not work. Republicans, controlled by agribusiness interests, want them to work but not to vote ... It reflects the unimaginative politics of confrontation that jeopardize race relations and elect demagogues like Barack Obama - Dick Morris, May, 2010

I don't like the way liberals of any income group assume that they have a monopoly on morality and that the only conscionable position on issues is their position. A sanctimoniousness runs in the liberal mind which is a direct descendant of the Calvinist assuredness of moral superiority. Liberals assume that any challenge to their position comes from impure motives, often motivations having to do with "profit and loss" instead of the "human" factors that liberals allegedly consider. I resent the assumption of liberals that only they truly understand human needs and suffering. -Ben Stein, 1976

Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else. French economist Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850)

Once you have said that the various economic, educational and other "gaps" and "disparities" of lagging groups are not due to either genes or cultures, what is left but the sins of other people? .... Multiculturalism enshrines the sins and grievances approach-- and paints the poor into a corner, where they can nurse their resentments, instead of advancing their skills and their prospects. The beneficiaries are politicians and race hustlers.-Thomas Sowell, Apr 2010

Less than 75 years after it officially began, the contest between capitalism and socialism is over: capitalism has won - Socialist Robert Heilbroner in the New Yorker 1989 essay The Triumph of Capitalism.

What's ailing America? Progressivism. Progressivism is the cancer of America and it's eating away at our Constitution. It was designed to do that. Glenn Beck, 2010 Conservative Political Action Conference

..our women are beautiful, we speak in complete sentences and our notion of freedom doesnt consist of snorting cocaine, which is certainly one thing that separates us from Barack Obama. - under 30 conservative author, Jason Mattera at the Feb 2010 Conservative Political Action Conference (which he dubbed our Woodstock)

Im back for the Second American Revolution, my weapons this time will be the Constitution, the Internet, and my talk-radio ads. -A man dressed as Gearge Washington at a Tea Party Rally- from Ben McGrath' The Movement in the New Yorker (Jan 30, 2010)

Europe is to be islamized. Democracy, Christianity, European culture and Europeans are to be driven out of Europe. Fifty million North Africans from Muslim countries are to be imported into the EU- Human rights group Stop the Islamization of Europe commenting on the 2010 Euro-Mediterranean partnership pact.

"We the people..." Those three words were a slap in the face to those who thought themselves entitled to rule, and who regarded the people as if they were simply human livestock, destined to be herded and shepherded by their betters. Indeed, to this very day, elites who think that way -- and that includes many among the intelligentsia, as well as political messiahs -- find the Constitution of the United States a real pain because it stands in the way of their imposing their will and their presumptions on the rest of us. -Thomas Sowell, 2011

Part of the genius of Marxism, and a reason for its enduring appeal, is that it fed man's neurotic fear of social catastrophe while providing an avenue for moral transcendence. It's just the same with global warming...-BRET STEPHENS, Wall St. Journal

...health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture-Mark Steyn Aug, 2009.

While the elites of the media, academia and the managerial class cant seem to absorb this fundamental reality, the American people know it. -Robert W. Merry on why "nobody can govern America from the left, because the country doesnt want to go there, and because whenever it has been tried in recent decades, it has failed - National Interest, after the all Republican Nov 2014 mid term elections.

..it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal -Henry Kissinger

Liberals love to think of themselves as sophisticated, nuanced intellectuals, but the truth is they have a kindergartners view of the world. If it has been defined as "nice" to people they like, they're for it. If it has been defined as "mean" to people they like, theyre against it -- and that is about as deep as it gets. Unfortunately, that lack of adult perspective isn't so cute in political leaders who are making life and death decisions that may still have ramifications fifty years from now. - columnist John Hawkins, May 2009

The state's crisis has been caused by "moderation," understood as splitting the difference between extreme liberalism and hyperliberalism, a "reasonableness" that merely moderates the speed at which the ever-expanding public sector suffocates the private sector. -George Will on California. May, 2009

... 50 years ago, its citizens average income was under $700 per year. Today, its $43,800. Hong Kong got rich because Hong Kongs rulers, stuffy British bureaucrats, practiced what Ill call benign neglect: they enforced rule of lawkept people from stealing from each other, or killing each other--- but then sat around and drank tea. They left people alone, and free people, left alone, created prosperity.-John Stossel on free markets and free people, Dec 2009.

... the Cold War's most dangerous legacy remains the bundle of radioactive lies that poisoned so many lands and deformed so many minds. The Soviets fueled national-socialist movements around the globe, telling the poor that if they embraced violent revolution and systematically purged capitalism, tradition and religion from their societies, they would hasten their ascent to the sunny uplands of history. The reverse was true: Whole generations were either slaughtered or left to live as dehumanized industrial cogs, or to labor as serfs tending crops amidst the bleached bones of their fellow countrymen. -Jonah Goldberg, Apr 2009

Then why not use spoons? Milton Friedman after being told a government-run canal-building project in Asia, that the workers were using shovels and wheelbarrows instead of bulldozers and earth-moving equipment because it meant more jobs for the workers

"...for the past four decades, American politics has consisted of Republicans controlling Washington ... thus allowing Americans to forget what it was they didn't like about Democrats- Ann Coulter

Government can't tax things like businesses or corporations, it can only tax people. When it says it's going to 'make business pay,' it is really saying it is going to make business help it collect taxes." -The Gipper

Mr. Obama is proving that one can be elected president without knowing how to behave presidentially. His servile gesture was fully fitting with the tone of his humility tour of Europe.- Washinton Times editorial [Apr 8, 2009] commenting on Obama's bow to Saudi King Abdullah at the Group of 20 summit in London

One of the things that I'm trying to break is a pattern in Washington where everybody is always looking for somebody else to blame.-Barack Obama, apparantly momentarily forgetting to blame Bush or the Republicans [also trying to quit smoking]

The ideal tyranny is that which is ignorantly self-administered by its victims. The most perfect slaves are, therefore, those which blissfully and unawaredly enslave themselves. A truth's initial commotion is directly proportional to how deeply the lie was believed. It wasn't the world being round that agitated people, but that the world wasn't flat. When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic.-author Dresden James

One way or another, we're going to try to figure out how to get these resources back. -Sen. Chris Dodd (D- CT), who only a month ago made sure that these particular bonuses were exempt from regulation in the stimulus bill (Dodd is also the recipient of the most campaign cash from AIG) [HYPOCRITE OF THE YEAR AWARD]

By abandoning principle for efficiency, the neo-Statist...is no more bound to the Constitution than the Statist. He marches more slowly but he marches with him nonetheless. - Mark Levin in Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto

Now, where do some of these attacks originate? They're coming from the very people whose past policies, all done in the name of compassion, brought us the current recession. Their policies drove up inflation and interest rates, and their policies stifled incentive, creativity and halted the movement of the poor up the economic ladder. Some of their criticism is perfectly sincere. But let's also understand that some of their criticism comes from those who have a vested interest in a permanent welfare constituency and in government programs that reinforce the dependency of our people. Well, I would suggest that no one should have a vested interest in poverty or dependency, that these tragedies must never be looked at as a source of votes for politicians or paychecks for bureaucrats. They are blights on our society that we must work to eliminate, not institutionalize.-Ronald Reagan

People who dont regularly communicate with the Democratic Party have no idea what a cesspool of hatred that organization is. It has one means, and one means only, of rallying its supporters to contribute money and to vote: that is to personalize every issue, and to demonize every opponent with smears that would make an honest man or woman blush-John Hinderaker, Powerline Blog

Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites,  in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity,  in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption,  in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters. -Edmund Burke

If a man were to do that to a woman today, he would likely be charged with sexual assault, found guilty, be ordered to pay a serious sum of money to the woman, be sent to prison, be civilly sued and be labeled a sex offender  effectively ruining much of his life. Dennis Prager on Alfred Eisenstaedts picture of an American sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square in New York City.

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded  here and there, now and then  are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.em This is known as bad luck. - Robert Heinlein

[T]he candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made in ordinary litigation between parties in personal actions, the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.-Abraham Lincoln- 1861 Inaugural Address

Its tough to know sometimes whether we are supposed to stand and fight in a place where we are surrounded by those who seek to destroy us by destroying what we believe. Or whether we should surround ourselves with like-minded individuals who will tell us what we want to hear. But theres no real chance of destroying what we believe. - Mike Adams, Sept 2009

"...democracies are vulnerable to proliferating parochial interests that use government to claim an ever larger share of private wealth. Slow but clear decline follows once narrow interests take the wider polity hostage" -Wall St Journal paraphrasing a phenomena shown by late economist Mancur Olson starting with "The Logic of Collective Action" (1965)

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling," wrote Oscar Wilde, and I would like to suggest that the same can be said for bad politics. . . .- Irving Kristol, 1972

The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.- Margaret Thatcher

Marxists claim that workers are oppressed in capitalist societies. Workers in communist societies always try to sneak out into capitalist societies. No one in South Korea is trying to sneak into North Korea. The Berlin Wall was not built to keep West Germans from sneaking into East Germany's collective farms. Cubans in Florida do not steal boats to seek asylum in Cuban collective farms. -Steven Plaut in the American Thinker, Mar 2009

All slave owners need to keep their slaves healthy and ensure that they have the skills to perform their tasks.-Cuban exile and Yale historian Carlos Eire on Cuba's health care.

Liberals do a great deal of talking about hearing other points of view, but it sometimes shocks them to learn that there are other points of view. -William F Buckley from his obituary in The TImes (28 February 2008)

Repressive tolerance  in other words, intolerance in the name of leftism  comes into play when colleges fail to provide students with exposure to advocates whose doctrines they reject or feel uncomfortable with. This occurs if such activists are not invited onto campus in the ordinary course of affairs (as opposed to at commencement) or if they are invited but not protected.-Paul Mirangoff on Brandeis disinvitation to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Powerline, Apr 2014.

Even if the stimulus is a magnificent success, the money still has to be paid back. The plan of record apparently is that we keep borrowing, spending and stimulating, faster and faster, until suddenly, on some signal from heaven or Timothy Geithner, we all stop spending and start saving in recordbreaking amounts. Oh sure, that will work.

There is another way. If it's not the actual, secret plan, it will be an overwhelming temptation: Don't pay the money back. So far, even as one piggy bank after another astounds us with its emptiness, there have been only the faintest whispers about the possibility of an actual default by the U.S. government. Somewhat louder whispers can be heard, though, about the gradual default known as inflation. Just three or four years of currency erosion at, say, 10 percent a year would slice the real value of our debt -- public and private, U.S. bonds and jumbo mortgages -- in half.

Anyone who regards the prospect of double-digit inflation with insouciance is either too young to have lived through it the last time (the late 1970s) or too old to remember. Among other problems, inflation works only as a surprise or betrayal. It can never be part of any public, official plan. Plan for 10 percent inflation, and you'll get 20. Plan for 20 and you'll need a wheelbarrow to pay for your morning Starbucks. But if that's not the plan, what is? -Liberal columnist Michael Kinsley, writing in the Washington Post, on the hidden dangers of deficit spending. Feb 2009

How can we retain the secular/progressive view of human nature, which is needed to justify secular/progressive policies, in light of a wealth of evidence to the contrary? -NC Prof. Mike Adams on how liberal professors solve problems

What's particularly odious about Obama's scare tactics is that he's using them for the mother of all bait- and-switches. He justifiably scares people about the magnitude of the financial crisis, but uses that fear not to sell them on a solution to the crisis but to trick them into signing up for a new Great Society -Jonah Goldberg , Feb 2009.

f youre one of those leftists, unable to sort out how the world works nowadays and unable to win an honest debate with your political and intellectual opponents, it makes you very angry, and you lash out at them with a violence that often surprises observers who are less engaged in the political or intellectual wars. The left has died as an intellectual force worth taking seriously. Its mission belongs to another time. -Michael Ledeen, PJ Media Aug 2012

This growth is a lovely thought, but how? The only impetus for growth in this budget comes from the government spending more money that it is taking out of the job-producing private economy. With $1 trillion of new entitlements, $1.4 trillion in new taxes, and $5 trillion in new debt, America's entrepreneurs aren't getting any help soon from Washington.-Feb 27, 2009 Wall St Journal Editorial on the first Obama budget.

Americans are only beginning to understand the magnitude of Mr. Obama's ambitions, and how much of their own income will be required to fulfill them. Republicans have an obligation to insist on a long and considerable debate on all of this, lest Americans discover in a year or two that they live in a very different country. .- Feb 27, 2009 Wall St Journal Editorial on the first Obama budget

Most people on the left are not opposed to freedom. They are just in favor of all sorts of things that are incompatible with freedom.-Thomas Sowell 2008

There is an old Russian fable, with different versions in other countries, about two poor peasants, Ivan and Boris. The only difference between them was that Boris had a goat and Ivan didn't. One day, Ivan came upon a strange-looking lamp and, when he rubbed it, a genie appeared. She told him that she could grant him just one wish, but it could be anything in the world. Ivan said, "I want Boris' goat to die." -Thomas Sowell

"The truth is ... that there is no 'fairness' whatever in the 'fairness' doctrine. On the contrary, it is a chilling federal attempt to compel some undefined 'balance' of what ideas radio and television new programs are to include. ... The 'fairness doctrine' undercuts free, independent, sound and responsive journalism -- substituting governmental dictates. That is deceptive, dangerous and, in a democracy, repulsive." -Washington Post editorial, June 24, 1987

According to the Medicare trustees, the program's excess costs over the next 75 years -- that is, the difference between expected outlays and revenues -- is more than $36 trillion, which even they acknowledge is several trillion too low given current trends. Even if Congress doubled all individual and corporate tax rates, it still wouldn't raise enough revenue to pay for Medicare and Medicaid. The Obama- Baucus solution to this slow-motion catastrophe is to add tens of millions more people to the federal balance sheet. - Wall St Journal Editorial - Nov 2008

...the ignorance of Ph.D.s is still ignorance and high-IQ groupthink is still groupthink, which is the antithesis of real thinkingTom Sowell on intellectuals

We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger tipping the cards in a letter to Dr. Clarence Gamble on Dec., 10, 1939

If we are to develop in America a new race with a racial soul, we must keep the birth rate within the scope of our ability to understand as well as to educate. We must not encourage reproduction beyond our capacity to assimilate our numbers so as to make the coming generation into such physically fit, mentally capable, socially alert individuals as are the ideal of a democracy Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger tipping cards again in Woman and the New Race, 1920, Chapter 3: The Materials of the New Race

The timid civilized world has found nothing with which to oppose the onslaught of a sudden revival of barefaced barbarity, other than concessions and smiles-A Solzhenitsyn in his acceptance speech for the 1970 Nobel literature prize

You cant be for big government, big taxes, and big bureaucracy and still be for the little guy Ronald Reagan

What this plan seems to amount to in practice are the Government's rights to refuse treatment, and the patient's responsibilities to live up to what the state decides are model standards. -The Telegraph on Gordon Brown's rights and responsibilities of the English health system (" ... people who have unhealthy habits such as smoking, heart sufferers who are obese or those who fall ill because of failure to take regular exercise might be refused medical care") - 2008

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didnt pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our childrens children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.-Ronald Reagan

Much of what government does is based on the premise that people can't do things for themselves. So government must do it for them. More often than not, the result is a ham-handed, bumbling, one-size-fits-all approach that leaves the intended beneficiaries worse off. Of course, this resulting failure is never blamed on the political approach -- on the contrary, failure is taken to mean the government solution was not extravagant enough. -John Stossel, Oct 2009

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.-Baltimore's political satirist, the late H.L. Mencken

It's truly amazing that Americans who are dissatisfied with the current level of socialized medicine in the U.S. are asking for more of what created the problem in the first place.- Walter Williams Oct 2008

We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. ... We have never made good on our promises. ... I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started ... and an enormous debt to boot!- from FDR's Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau's diary

Its information is not reliable, it has too much chrome and glitz, its doors rattle, it breaks down almost immediately, and it's sold without warranty. It's flashy but it's basically junk.-Michael Crichton, in 1993, predicting the fall of the American media

What I do know is my level of confidence in mainstream media of all stripes has been shaken to the core over the past 10 or 15 years. My level of trust in what I read, hear or see is somewhere close to zero and my suspicion continues to grow that television networks, newspaper groups and radio empires are advancing agendas that do not include honest, accurate and unbiased reports. -Journalist Bill McIntyre on media bias

There are good reasons to begin with a presumption against government action. As coercive monopolies that spend other people's money taken by force, governments are uniquely unqualified to solve problems. They are riddled by ignorance, perverse incentives, incompetence and self-serving-John Stossel

Though we may have speeded up a little the conquest of want, disease, ignorance, squalor, and idleness, we may in the future do even worse in that struggle when the chief dangers will come from inflation, paralyzing taxation, coercive labor unions, and ever increasing dominance of government in education, and a social service bureaucracy with far-reaching arbitrary powers - dangers from which the individual cannot escape by his own efforts and which the momentum of the overextended machinery of government is likely to increase rather than mitigate. - F.A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty

We have to remember, before it is too late, that this nation was founded not to furnish glamorous offices for politicians, or to produce goods and services, or handouts of easy money, but to produce free men. - Dos Passos

If there is one thing that mankind should have learned from the agonies of the last four decades it is that its never safe to do evil that good may come of it. The good gets lost and the evil goes on. - Dos Passos

New Jersey does not have a tax problem; New Jersey has a spending and size of government problem.-New Jersey Governor Chris Christie after vetoing a Democrat bill increasing the top tax rate to 10.75%, May, 2010.

To many who have watched the transition from socialism to fascism at close quarters the connection between the two systems has become increasingly obvious, but in the (Western) democracies the majority of people still believe that socialism and freedom can be combined. They do not realize that democratic socialism, the great utopia of the last few generations, is not only unachievable, but that to strive for it produces something utterly different - the very destruction of freedom itself. As has been aptly said: What has always made the state a hell on earth has been precisely that man has tried to make it his heaven.' - F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom

Liberalism's bullying tendencies are never more on display than when its denizens are at war with the speech rights of its opponents. -Wall Street Journal Editorial Jan 23, '10 after the Supreme Court struct down most of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance laws

... we are a confection of normal (greedy, lustful, duplicitous, corrupt, inspiredin short, human) individuals living under a spectacularly effective compact called the Constitution, and lucky to get it.- former liberal David Mamet

No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session - Nineteenth Century New York Judge Gideon Tucker

Liberals sell the welfare state one brick at a time, deflecting inquiries about the size and cost of the palace theyre building-William Voegeli author of The Trouble with Limited Government" 

I consider the foundation of the Constitution as laid on this ground that all powers not delegated to the United States, by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states or to the people. To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specially drawn around the powers of Congress, is to take possession of a boundless field of power, not longer susceptible of any definition. Thomas Jefferson

The subject of politics, Aristotle noted, is the good life for man. What constitutes the good life? Aron cannily reminds us that the more extravagant answers to this question are often the most malevolent. They promise everything. They tend to deliver misery and impoverishment. Roger Kimball, on Arons Opium for the Intellectuals, PJ Media, Nov 2011

When Hollywood portrayed glandular instincts as the new moral compass of the secular age, conservatives waxed nostalgic over the lost decency of the "studio system." When the education industry shelved the great books in favor of hugs, conservatives lamented the demise of the three Rs and the "closing of the American mind." When the left became enamored with a "riot ideology" that mistook lawlessness for political protest, conservatives invoked "law and order." Name a front in the political and culture wars, and conservatives defended the authority of authority and the tradition of tradition, while liberals and leftists defended sticking it to the man -Jonah Goldberg, Jul 2010

We came unarmed (this time)- Sign spotted in the Sept 12 March on Washington

Many on the political left are so entranced by the beauty of their vision that they cannot see the ugly reality they are creating in the real world. -Thomas Sowell

To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical. - Thomas Jefferson

Hayek concluded that the private-property rights that come with the rule of law, freedom of contract, and freedom of association is still the one mechanism design that mobilizes and utilizes the dispersed information in an economy-Wall Street Journal Editorial, Oct 16, 2007.

In political life today, you are considered compassionate if you demand that government impose your preferences on others. - John Stossel 2007

In their assessment of what is going on in the world, they seem to start off with a default assumption that we are in the wrong. The "we" can take different forms: the United States government, the vast mass of middle-class Americans, white people, affluent people, churchgoing people or the advanced English- speaking countries. Such people are seen as privileged and selfish, greedy and bigoted, rash and violent. If something bad happens, the default assumption is that it's their fault. They always blame America -- or the parts of America they don't like -- first. -Michael Barone, U.S. News & World Report

Republicans have too eclectic a collection of beliefs to beat the Democrats on a purely ideological basis. Moreover, the liberal vision is a more attractive vision because it assumes away many of the painful and even brutal aspects of human life, especially the fatal dangers of relying on words when dealing with people who only respect force that is backed up by a willingness to use it..... Facts are the only real antidote to a seductive vision.-Thomas Sowell after the 2006 mid-term elections

The republic was not established by cowards, and cowards will not preserve it.Elmer Davis

Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master. -George Washington

They are going out of fashion where they are needed most and coming into fashion where they are needed least.-Wall St Journal's Bret Stevens on Nukes

No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on this earth! We are a nation that has a government -- not the other way around.-Ronald Reagan

I think Clintons candidacy  like Trumps candidacy, in its own, very different way  points to the fatal weakness of the political parties. Decades of good government reforms have systematically stripped the power that parties once had: to control money, to control committee assignments, to control how much pork politicians get to brag about to the voters back home. Whats left is a hollow shell that cannot effectively respond to either grassroots insurgencies or to outsize figures who effectively turn the party apparatus to their own ends. If you think, as I do, that parties play a vital role in organizing political action toward coherent goals and long-term accountability, thats something that should worry you. -Megan McArdle, Bloomberg, July 2016

I did very little. All I did was to try to prevent some of the things that might undo it. -John James Cowperthwaite - on his refusal to collect economic statistics about Hong Kong during his tenure as Financial Secretary, lest they produce an impulse toward central planning among the bureaucrats

"...the main wealth-acquiring activity practised by the French today is waiting for ones parents to die." -David Goldman, Standpoint Magazine, May, 2016

Perhaps, one of the most important accomplishments of my administration has been minding my own business-President Calvin Coolidge

...in order to be effective a doctrine must not be understood, but has to be believed in. We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand -Eric Hoffer in "The True Believer"

Only people not being able to find comfort in their own mind seek to silence others. - Per Bylund

"...the smaller the society, the smaller the number of individuals composing a majority, and the more easily will they concert and execute their plans of oppression" -James Madison in the Federalist Papers warning that local government is especially prone to tyranny

"The country is behind you 50 percent." -Bob Hope joking to the troops in Vietnam

"Liberty is the prevention of control by others. This requires self-control and, therefore, religious and spiritual influences; education, knowledge, well-being." Lord Acton

...the best this Administration offersa dull, adventureless journey from one entitlement to the next, a government-planned life, a country where everything is free but us.-Paul Ryan, 2012 Acceptance Speach

"Most of the work of government does not need to be done. And, if you can remember that, if we could all remember that, this country would be better off." Lyn Nofziger

There is no such thing as life imprisonment without the possibility of a liberal president being elected and issuing a pardon or an amnesty. - Thomas Sowell on the Zacarias Moussaoui trial

Civilizations die from suicide, not murder -Arnold Toynbee

I have been asked to talk about what I consider the most important challenge facing mankind, and I have a fundamental answer. The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda. - Michael Crichton, 2003

... family dissolution in the modern world leads to a welfare state to take care of the women and children and a police state to handle the teenaged boys -George Gilder

...this was in the Soviet Union. Soviet engineers couldnt make Jell -O. Theyd show up at the Worlds Fair and stare at a flush toilet like it was a rocket ship.-Ann Coulter

Some argue that we should encourage democratic change in right-wing dictatorships, but not in communist regimes. Well, to accept this preposterous notion -- as some well-meaning people have -- is to invite the argument that once countries achieve a nuclear capability, they should be allowed an undisturbed reign of terror over their own citizens. We reject this course.'' - Ronald Reagan - June 1982 speech to the British Parliament

"I urge you to beware the temptation of pride, the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil. ... - Ronald Reagan - Speech to the National Association of Evangelicals, March 1983.

"I believe that communism is another sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages even now are being written.'' -- Ronald Reagan - Speech to the National Association of Evangelicals, March 1983.

The poor are the very lifeblood of the left, attracting activists, support among the intelligentsia, and -- perhaps most important -- allowing the left to indulge in self-congratulation as people who "care."-Tom Sowell 2006

The beauty of being a liberal is that history always begins this morning. - Ann Coulter 2004

I for one hope that the next time a nation experimenting with socialism or communism fails, which will happen the next time a nation experiments with socialism or communism, Ken Galbraith will feel the need to explain what happened. It's great fun to read. It helps, of course, to suppress wistful thought about those who endured, or died trying, the passage toward collective living to which Professor Galbraith has beckoned us for over 40 years. - William F. Buckley in his review of liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith's last book, "The Culture of Contentment."

"A republic -- if you can keep it." - Benjamin Franklin's response at the close of the 1787 Constitutional Convention to the question "What the Founders had given us?"

"The left takes its vision seriously -- more seriously than it takes the rights of other people. They want to be our shepherds. But that requires us to be sheep." -- Thomas Sowell

"No one can read our Constitution without concluding that the people who wrote it wanted their government severely limited; the words 'no' and 'not' employed in restraint of government power occur 24 times in the first seven articles of the Constitution and 22 more times in the Bill of Rights." - Edmund A. Opitz

Finally, we might decide that civilization itself is worth preserving. In that case we have to work out what to save and which people would be needed in a drastically reduced population -- weighing the value of scientists and musicians against that of politicians, for example - Dr. Sue Blackmore looking on the bright side in Britain's Guardian- 2006

"...The Iron Curtain that scarred a continent is gone, as is the Evil Empire responsible for it. The feeling of foreboding -- the sense of shrunken possibilities -- that afflicted Americans 20 years ago has been banished by a new birth of the American belief in perpetually expanding horizons. Reagan was the last president for whom the Depression -- the years when America stopped working -- was a formative experience. Remarkably, the 1930s formed in him a talent for happiness. It was urgently needed in the 1980s, when the pessimism of the intelligentsia was infecting people with the idea that America had passed its apogee and was ungovernable. - George Will in memory of Ronald Reagan - June 6, 2004

I've always wondered why Republicans insist on acting like Democrats in hopes of retaining political power, while Democrats act like us in order to win.-Dick Armey, after the 2006 midterm elections

They will not improve your healthcare. They will take your healthcare and sell it to someone else for a mere vote.- The Raven, Sept 2009

The broad masses of a population are more amenable to the appeal of rhetoric than to any other force. - Adolf Hitler

It's like taking a bucket of water from the deep end of a pool and dumping it into the shallow end -George Mason University economist Russell Roberts on the 2008 "Economic Stimulus"

"...As an aide to President Carter, I smelled trouble. We weren't running against a Republican: we were running against the republic. "Can anyone look at the record of this administration and say, Well done?" he asked the Republican National Convention which had just nominated him for President. Or at the state of our economy when the Carter administration took office with where we are today and say, "Keep up the good work!" - Chris Matthews in memory of Ronald Reagan - June 6, 2004

"Collectivism, as an intellectual power and a moral ideal, is dead. But freedom and individualism, and their political expression, capitalism, have not yet been discovered." - Ayn Rand

Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm -- but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves -T.S. Eliot

Another current catch-phrase is the complaint that the nations of the world are divided into 'haves' and the 'have-nots.' Observe that the 'haves' are those who have freedom, and that it is freedom that the 'have-nots' have not." -- Ayn Rand

I can hardly imagine any laws so bad, to which I would not rather be subject than to the caprice of a man - John Stuart Mill

A pure democracy can admit no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will be felt by a majority, and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party. Hence it is, that democracies have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have, in general, been as short in their lives as they have been violent in thier deaths." - James Madison.

Capitalism is founded on freedom, with the brakes applied to it only a little, so that it does not run out of control downhill. On the other hand, communism-turned-socialism in the US is founded on control and restriction, with a little of the brakes released, so that it does not do more than crawl downhill. - Jim Arlandson 2005

Isn't it somewhat remarkable that we can go back a a few hundred years and find no shortage of quotations from our founding fathers warning us against the dangers of democracy, yet today teachers and politicians use thword as if it were an offering of gold." "Our founding fathers detested the idea of a democracy and labored long to prevent America becoming one. Once again -- the word 'democracy' does not appear in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, or the constitution of any of the fifty states. Not once. Furthermore, take a look at State of the Union speeches. You won't find the 'D' word uttered once until the Wilson years." "I cant think of anything that would do more toward putting us back on the road to liberty and personal responsibility than for the average American, and for the news media, to come to the understanding that we are not a democracy, nor were we supposed to be." - Neal Boortz

Liberals love to boast that they are not religious, which is what one would expect to hear from the state-sanctioned religion. Of course liberalism is a religion. It has its own cosmology, its own miracles, its own beliefs in the supernatural, its own churches, its own high priests, its own saints, its own total worldview, and its own explanation of the existence of the universe. In other words, liberalism contains all the attributes of what is generally known as religion. -Ann Coulter 2006

"'Democracy' does not mean freedom." - Mark Da Cunha

"Democracy is four wolves and a sheep voting on dinner." -- Robert A. Heinlein

The case has been made that the Palestinian choice of government undermines the logic of the Bush Administration's democracy agenda. But democracy always involves the risk that the bad guys might come to power: Look at Germany in 1933. By contrast, failing to promote democracy only guarantees that the bad guys -- the Gadhafis, the Assads, the Husseins -- will stay in power. - Wall Street Journal Editorial - 2006

I feel so much more confident that the TSA's nude photos of airline passengers will never be released now that I know the government couldn't even prevent half a million classified national security documents from being posted on WikiLeaks. -Ann COulter Dec 2010

Socialism is a wonderful idea. It is only as a reality that it has been disastrous Attempts to redistribute wealth repeatedly led to the redistribution of poverty. Nowhere have people been willing to work as well for the common good as they do for their own benefit. Any system which allows some people to exercise unbridled power over other people is an open invitation to abuse. - Thomas Sowell, 2002

"The liberalism of the liberal crack-up is what is "extremist." Even a sensible idea or a fine principle is exaggerated to the point that it becomes preposterous and untenable" - Emmett Tyrrell

Let us lay to rest, once and for all, the myth of a small group of ideological purists trying to capture a majority. Replace it with the reality of a majority trying to assert its rights against the tyranny of powerful academics, fashionable left-revolutionaries, some economic illiterates who happen to hold elective office and the social engineers who dominate the dialogue and set the format in political and social affairs. If there is any ideological fanaticism in American political life, it is to be found among the enemies of freedom on the left or right  those who would sacrifice principle to theory, those who worship only the god of political, social and economic abstractions, ignoring the realities of everyday life. They are not conservatives.- Ronald Reagan

Those who want to take our money and gain power over us have discovered the magic formula: Get us envious or angry at others and we will surrender, in installments, not only our money but our freedom. The most successful dictators of the 20th century -- Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Mao -- all used this formula and now class warfare politicians here are doing the same. - Thomas Sowell, 2004

"People who are very aware that they have more knowledge than the average person are often very unaware that they do not have one- tenth of the knowledge of all of the average persons put together. In this situation, for the intelligentsia to impose their notions on ordinary people is essentially to impose ignorance on knowledge." -Thomas Sowell

To me, consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies. So it is something in which no one believes and to which no one objects If you just set out to be liked, you would be prepared to compromise on anything at any time, and you would achieve nothing - Margaret Thatcher

"Don't forget that pure democracy is a form of collectivism -- it readily sacrifices individual rights to majority wishes. Since it involves no constitutional bill of rights, or at least, no working and effective one, the majority-of-the-moment can and does vote away the rights of the minority-of-the-moment, even of a single individual. This has been called 'mob rule,' the 'tyranny of the majority' and many other pejorative names. It is one of the greatest threats to liberty, the reason why America's founding fathers wrote so much so disparagingly of pure democracy." - Bert Rand

Rather than serving as a cleansing force, science has in some instances been seduced by the more ancient lures of politics and publicity.-Michael Crichton

"Collectivism holds that the individual has no rights, that his life and work belong to the group (to "society," to the tribe, the state, the nation) and that the group may sacrifice him at its own whim to its own interests. The only way to implement a doctrine of that kind is by means of brute force -- and statism has always been the poltical corollary of collectivism." -Ayn Rand

The free man will ask neither what his country can do for him nor what he can do for his country. He will ask rather "What can I and my compatriots do through government" to help us discharge our individual responsibilities, to achieve our several goals and purposes, and above all, to protect our freedom? And he will accompany this question with another: How can we keep the government we create from becoming a Frankenstein that will destroy the very freedom we establish it to protect?

Freedom is a rare and delicate plant. Our minds tell us, and history confirms, that the great threat to freedom is the concentration of power. Government is necessary to preserve our freedom, it is an instrument through which we can exercise our freedom; yet by concentrating power in political hands, it is also a threat to freedom. Even though the men who wield this power initially be of good will and even though they be not corrupted by the power they exercise, the power will both attract and form men of a different stamp.

Milton Friedman on JFK's 'Ask not what your country can do for youask what you can do for your country.' in "Capitalism and Freedom" (1962):

The typical liberal politician is soft on criminals, weak on defense, and ready to tax the daylights out of those who produce, in order to dispense largesse to parasites, rich and poor alike. The public isn't buying it. Indeed, liberal politicians aren't trying to sell it very much. - Thomas Sowell, 2003

"I have wondered at times about what the Ten Commandment's would have looked like if Moses had run them through the U.S. Congress" "I've laid down the law, though, to everyone from now on about anything that happens: no matter what time it is, wake me, even if it's in the middle of a Cabinet meeting" -Ronald Reagan

"Intellectuals cannot operate at room temperature." Hype, moral melodrama, and sweeping visions are the way that intellectuals approached the problems of the world. "Nowhere at present is there such a measureless loathing of their country by educated people as in America." - Eric Hoffer , Thomas Sowell, 2003

-When it becomes dominated by a collectivist creed, democracy will inevitably destroy itself. -To be controlled in our economic pursuits means to be controlled in everything - F. A. Hayek

A careful definition of words would destroy half the agenda of the political left and scrutinizing evidence would destroy the other half. - Thomas Sowell, 2003

Thats the wonderful thing about multiculturalism: you can choose which side of the war you want to fight on. When the draft card arrives, just tick home team or enemy, according to taste.-Mark Steyn 2006

"..Evolution has conditioned us to believe the worst." In Darwinian natural selection, pessimism, wariness, suspicion and discontent may be survival traits. Perhaps our relaxed and cheerful progenitors were eaten by saber-toothed tigers. Only the anxiety-prone gene pool prospered. - George Will on Easterbrook's Book, "The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse," 2004

"You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot help the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by encouraging class hatred. You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot build character and courage by taking away man's initiative and incentive. And you cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they should do for themselves." -Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele - GOP Convention 2004

"Collectivism is the real-world manifestation of the subjective, emotion-based feral animal origins of humanity, like some recurring echo emanating from the primitive reptile brain that physically exists in all of us. It is the antithesis of rational objectivity, something that no amount of fancy verbiage from Marx or Chomsky or Himmler or Plato or Rousseau can disguise in their respective paeans to force and unity over intellect and evolution. Collectivism is a fancy word for tribalism. It is a hold over, an atavistic throw back ..." - Perry de Havilland

How do you tell a communist? Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti- Communist? It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin.-Ronald Reagan - 1987

When America frees ordinary people from the domination of their betters, and prevents them for being used as guinea pigs for the vision of the anointed, the more America insults the very presumptions that enable the anointed to think of themselves as special, as one-up on the rest of us. -Thomas Sowell; July 2, 2004

[Liberals] live in a different reality from that of the rest of us. Psychologically, they do not see what you see. They see the present and the past through a special lens. What is overwhelmingly clear to them is an imagined future collectivist utopia where antagonisms of class and race have been eliminated, the economic and social inequalities that have driven people to crime have been removed, poverty does not exist and social justice reigns, world brotherhood has replaced war and international strife, and an economy planned by people like them has produced economic abundance without pollution or waste. Coupled with this vision of the future is loathing of the real present which falls woefully short of these goals and hatred for anyone or anything that stands in the way of their illusion of the radiant future. -John Earl Haynes, 2003

"Most modern intellectuals congratulate themselves for having achieved the allegedly momentus insight that capitalism and altruism are ultimately incompatible. Yet they're still too damned ignorant to realize, or too damned stubborn to acknowledge, that altruism is definitely NOT the only moral code available to mankind; it is, in fact, the bloodiest and most regressive one of all. Such stunted thinking on the part of the intelligentsia has resulted in their committing the intellectual atrocity of rejecting the capitalism and freedom instead of the altruism and coercion." - Rick Gaber

Those who are unable to produce their own wealth aim to confiscate the wealth of others - Per Bylund

People in government--people in a huge, sprawling government--often get carried away. And they don't always even mean to. But they are little tiny parts of a large and overwhelming thing. If government is a steamroller, and that is in good part how I see it, the individuals who work in it are the atoms in the steel. The force of forward motion carries them along. There is inevitably an unaccountability, and in time often an indifference about what the steamroller rolls over. All the busy little atoms are watching each other, competing with each other, winning one for their little cluster. And no one is looking out and being protective of what the steamroller is rolling over--traditions, shared beliefs, individual rights, old assumptions, whatever is being rolled over today.-Peggy Noonan - 2006

They have accepted an understanding of political life that is all about the competition for power, the deal making that divides up the public pie so that more voters slop up the goodies at your trough than at the other guy's. Though skilled at building coalitions, they have become utterly incompetent at the work of building, serving and preserving a community. - Alan Keyes on today's politicians, 2006

Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it - Ronald Reagan

What is the difference between a taxidermist and a tax collector? The taxidermist takes only your skin - Mark Twain

Knowledge is one of the few things that can be given to others without reducing the amount you have left. - Thomas Sowell - 2005

We have now been through at least two generations of constant denigration of American society, two generations in which cheap glory could be gained by flouting rules and mocking values. - Thomas Sowell, 2006

For half a century, liberals have corrupted the courts by turning them into an instrument of radical social change on questions -- school prayer, abortion, busing, death penalty -- that properly belong to the elected branches of government. -Charles Krauthammer

Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state lives at the expense of everyone -Frederic Bastiat

[Democrats] have managed to pioneer an even more egregious abuse of the American political system: the manipulation of ignorance ... they have been reduced to a state of unshakable hysteria, beginning with the conviction that George W. Bush is the most vicious, evil, conniving president in American history. -Tony Snow

It continues to defy explanation why liberals, who theoretically love liberty, equality, tolerance and moderation, should find so much to despise in their own country, which represents the fullest expression of those virtues anywhere on the globe." --Mona Charen

The only way Congress can give one American something is to first, through the use of intimidation, threats and coercion, take it from another American. So-called rights to medical care, food and decent housing impose an obligation on some other American who, through the tax code, must be denied his right to his earnings. - Walter Williams

"Some ideas seem so plausible that they can fail nine times in a row and still be believed the tenth time. Other ideas seem so implausible that they can succeed nine times in a row and still not be believed the tenth time. Government controls in the economy are among the first kinds of ideas and the operation of a free market is among the second kinds of ideas." --Thomas Sowell 2005

When conservative judges strike down laws, it's because of what's in the Constitution. When liberal judges strike down laws (or impose new laws, such as tax increases), it's because of what's in The New York Times. - Ann Coulter 2005

"...professors require their students to repeat back to them on test papers and in theses what the professors believe. Unless students hate Republicans, revile George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, renounce God, support abortion and gay rights, they can sometimes expect a lower, even a failing grade. -Cal Thomas, Sept '09

Modern liberalism: "made in much the same way as a sausage -- it's a blend of fascist, Communist, and socialist ideologies from twentieth century Europe, with a pinch of Nazism, all ground together, yet retaining the flavor of its various parts" - Michael Savage, Liberalism Is a Mental Disorder

Democracy and capitalism seem to have triumphed. But, appearances can be deceiving. Instead of celebrating capitalism's virtues, we offer it grudging acceptance, contemptuous tolerance but only for its capacity to feed the insatiable maw of socialism. We do not conclude that socialism suffers from a fundamental and profound flaw. We conclude instead that its ends are worthy of any sacrifice  including our freedom. Revel notes that Marxism has been "shamed and ridiculed everywhere except American universities" but only after totalitarian systems "reached the limits of their wickedness." - Janice Rogers Brown, Associate Justice, California Supreme Court, Apr 2000

If the Supreme Court is to be invariably and inescapably political you realize we have rendered the Constitution useless - Justice Scalia 2005

Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm -- but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves. - T. S. Elliot

What is one to say about these media--Democratic spokesmen for contemporary American liberalism? That they have embarrassed and discredited themselves. That they cannot be taken seriously as critics. It would be good to have a responsible opposition party in the United States today. It would be good to have a serious mainstream media. Too bad we have neither.-William Kristol 2006

"...most liberals experience their differences with the rest of society as a sign of their advanced intelligence and consciousness. At best, they are perplexed at how long it is taking everyone else to catch-up with their enlightened state of understanding. -Thomas Lifson 2005

The Federalists drafted the greatest political philosophy ever written by man and created the first constitutional republic. The anti-Federalists -- or "pre-Democrats, as I call them -- were formed to oppose the Constitution, which, to a great extent, remains their position today. -Ann Coulter

What is a moderate interpretation [of the Constitution]? Halfway between what it says and halfway between what you want it to say? - Anthony Scalia noting that the left uses code words "mainstream" or "moderate" to describe their judges. [2006]

The Obamanation

Barack Obama doesnt speak a foreign language or play a musical instrument, exhibits no sign that any great book has left a mark upon his mind, has never, so far as the printed word can document, uttered an original thought or put forth an interesting idea. -Kevin Williamson

[T]he deepest truth about Obama is that there is no depth. Hes smart without being wise. Hes glib without being eloquent. Hes a celebrity without being interesting. Hes callow. -Rich Lowry

Sometimes -- maybe almost always -- the world seems to run on Freudian projection. One of the salient recent examples is Barack Obama's supporters -- and Obama himself, literally and by implication -- calling Donald Trump "authoritarian." But in non-projected reality, during his administration, Obama is the one who imposed what we might deem -- in appropriately Maoist parlance -- the "Three Authoritarianisms." They were the Paris climate accord, the Iran deal, and US intelligence agencies being used to surveil American citizens. All three of these "authoritarianisms" were entirely ex-Constitutional. - Roger Simon, May 2017

- This is more than just the usual standard lie, because when you suggest rigging or fraud without a shred of evidence, when last night, at the debate, Trump becomes the first major party nominee in American history to suggest that he will not concede despite losing the vote and then says today that he will accept the results if he wins  that is not a joking matter. I want everybody to pay attention here. That is dangerous, because when you try to sow the seeds of doubt in people's minds about the legitimacy of our elections, that undermines our democracy. Then youre doing the work of our adversaries for them. Because our democracy depends on people knowing that their vote matters, that those who occupy the seats of power were chosen by the people. - Obama speaking at a rally for Hillary Clinton in Miami.

As soon as Obama won, he apparently thought his job was done. No presidential candidate had ever promised more than he had  he'd all but vowed to change heaven and earth  and surely no candidate had ever raised expectations as high. Obama, in the eyes of his fervent admirers, was virtually unsullied  not a politician but a savior just waiting to be seated on his throne. Millions who had cast their votes for him felt they'd hitched their wagons to a shining star. But Obama himself didn't seem to care. He didn't seem remotely interested in delivering. - Bruce Bawer reflecting back on Obama (who he voted for)

... as bad a president as Obama has been, imagine how much more damage he could have done if not for his laziness. - Bruce Bawer reflecting back on Obama

Central to this worldview is that the American people are naive and easily manipulated, and thus need to be brought up to speed by a paternal administration that knows what is best for its vulnerable and clueless citizenry. Such condescension is also why the administration never believes it has done anything wrong by hiding the facts of these controversies. Its players believe that because they did it all for us, the ensuing distasteful means will be forgotten once we finally progress enough to appreciate their enlightened ends. - V D Hanson on Obama's use of deception for political means

The Emerging Democratic Majority[is] now available in hardcover from Amazon for 1 cent plus shipping  Wall St. Journals James Taranto on the 2002 book which put forth the argument that demographic change made Democratic ascendancy inevitable. Nov, 2016.

The old blue-collar middle class was bewildered by the leftwing social agenda in which gay marriage, women in combat units, and transgendered restrooms went from possible to mandatory party positions in an eye blink. In a party in which white privilege was pro forma disparagement, those who were both white and without it grew furious that the elites with such privilege massaged the allegation to provide cover for their own entitlement. - Victor David Hanson after the Trump win.

Melania Trump used a few lines from a Michelle Obama speech last night. Obama was revealed to have lied about the Iran deal such that the outlaw state will have nuclear weapons a lot faster than he claimed. Can you guess which news is dominating todays headlines? Go on. Guess. -Andrew Klavan, Ricochet July, 2016

In Detroit, 96 percent of eighth graders are not proficient in math. Ninety-three percent are not proficient in reading. In Baltimore, 91 percent of the students fail the math exam. In Chicago, 77 percent of students fall below standards in achievement. In 17 of our 50 largest cities, fewer than half of all students graduate from high school. ...And yet, what issue of injustice in schools has focused the attention, passion, and power of the liberal elites? Guaranteeing every child the right to use the bathroom of his or her (zis or xyr) choosing. - Newt Gingrich

... here it is on the very verge of 2016, President Obama's last full year in office, and he has not figured out that there is more to the job than giving speeches. -Kevin Williamson, National Review.

I dont know about that  Jeremiah Wright when asked if he converted Obama from being a Muslim into a Christian

Before ObamaCare, it would've been hard to find a health plan that combined a huge $6,000 deductible, few in-network doctors, and sky-high premiums. Today, thanks to ObamaCare, it's hard not to. - Investors Business Daily editorial, July 18, 2015

Ukraine has lost Crimea; Russia has lost Ukraine; the U.S. has lost Russia; the world has lost stability. -Henry Kissinger on Obama's foreign policy 2015

 Let me say this to you Mr Obama, you may have a pen and you may have a phone, but we have the constitution of the United States. And we, not you, we own that constitution, we own this country, and you Mr Obama do not have any legitimate authority to fundamentally transform what does not belong to you. -Mark Levin, CPAC 2015

Obama delivered a farewell speech in New Delhi, wrapping up his trip to India. The speech was only 33 minutes long, and yet Barack managed to work in references to himself no fewer than 118 times. -JOHN HINDERAKER, Jan, 2015

Ignoring reality is part of the job description of being a progressive. -George Will critiquing President Obamas 2015 State of the Union address

Its easy to despise Barack Hussein Obama, perhaps the least qualified man ever to accede to the Oval Office. The empty resume, the imaginary biographies, the laziness, the arrogance, the profligacy with the public treasury, the weakness, the cowardice and the cringing servility when dealing with Americas enemies abroad: his six years as president of the United States  a presidency we will all look back upon someday with wonder, shame and national embarrassment .... The man is a disgrace. -Michael Walsh, PJ Media, Jan 2015

I just took an action to change the law -The Emperor of the United States, in Chicago, Nov. 2014

...he has issued an imperial order to dissolve Americas borders. Millions more will enter and demand the same amnesty benefits as those who came before. The entire moral foundation and consistency of our laws will have been eviscerated. Law enforcement officials have repeatedly warned that the presidents new amnesty will unleash a tidal wave of illegal immigration. The impact on our jobs, wages, hospitals, schools, police departments and neighborhoods will be crushing. -Sen. Jeff Sessions in USA Today on Obama's immigration executive order.

This is liberalism that meets no challenge, fixes no problem. The causal oomph that drives the process is the benefits that flow to those directly involved. Congressmen cant extract donations from the auto industry or telecom industry or health insurers if costly, consequential rules affecting those industries arent being drafted. ... The needs of the liberal machine are being met, the full-time retinue of fixers, lobbyists and activists who extract rents by controlling things. -WSJ's Holman Jenkins claiming Obama's internet regulation is only proposed to grab Google, Netflix, Comcast, Amazon deep pockets while they mold the law......not to solve any problem. Nov 2014

Now that two of the last three Democratic presidencies have been emphatically judged to have been failures, the worlds oldest political party  the primary architect of this nations administrative state  has some thinking to do. -George Will after the 2014 mid-terms elections.

The defeat  a massacre, the Economist called it  marks the final collapse of Obamaism, a species of left liberalism so intrusive, so incompetently executed and ultimately so unpopular that it will be seen as a parenthesis in American political history. -Charles Krauthammer commenting on the 2014 mid term election results.

I think I could probably do every job on the campaign better than the people Ill hire to do it I think Im a better speechwriter than my speechwriters I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors And Ill tell you right now that Im gonna think Im a better political director than my political director

-Obama

I hate that man Obama more than any man Ive ever met, more than any man who ever lived -Bill Clinton during the 2008 campaign after Obama called him a racist.

Nobody believes you. -Paul Ryan to IRS Commissioner John Koskinen after a long dialog on why they lost Lois Lerner's emails

As we peer into societys future, weyou and I and our government  must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage -President Eisenhower in his farewell address to Congress with advice to Obama

... President Obamas VA scandal is the most serious and damaging of his presidency. It is the Obama administration in sum and in miniature: incompetent management of a health system, defended by crude media manipulation. - WAPO's Michael Gerson , May, 2014

What better way to "attrition out" the stubborn bitter clingers? So that they could be replaced by the indoctrinated, imported and indentured. - Blogger cfbleachers responding to Roger Simon's The Veterans Scandal: Socialized Medicine on Trial, May, 2014

Its not simply that Mr. Obama has fallen short of what he promised; its that he has been, in so many respects, a failure. Choose your metrics. Better yet, choose Mr. Obamas metrics: Job creation. Economic growth. Improving our health-care system. Reducing the debt. Reducing poverty. Reducing income inequality. Slowing the rise of the oceans. Healing the planet. Repairing the world. The Russian reset. Peace in the Middle East. Red lines in Syria. Renewed focus on Afghanistan. A new beginning with the Arab world. Better relations with our allies. Depolarizing our politics. Putting an end to the type of politics that breeds division and conflict and cynicism. Working with the other party. Transparency. No lobbyists working in his administration. His commitment to seek public financing in the general election. The list goes on and on. By now, nearly five and a half years into the Obama presidency, objective people can draw reasonable conclusions, among which are these: Barack Obama was among the least prepared men to ever serve as presidency. It shows. He has been overmatched by events right from the start. He is an excellent campaigner but unusually inept when it comes to governing.

-Peter Wehner. Commentary Apr 2014

Our liberal friends have left us with a pile of dung the size of the Horsehead Nebula. -Roger Simon on the aftermath of the complete failure of Obamas foreign and domestic policies ; PJ Media, Apr 2014.

I just want to be absolutely clear, alright. So I dont want any misunderstanding. When yall go home and youre talking to your buddies, and they say, Ah, he wants to take my gun away, youve heard it here  Im on television so everybody knows it  I believe in the Second Amendment. I believe in peoples lawful right to bear arms. I will not take your shotgun away. I will not take your rifle away. I wont take your handgun away. So, there are some common-sense gun safety laws that I believe in. But I am not going to take your guns away. So if you want to find an excuse not to vote for me, dont use that one. Cause that just aint true. -Obama, Sept. 9, 2008

Obama ordered an intensification of our effort in Afghanistan, while admitting privately that he expected it to fail. Approximately 80% of the fatalities our military has suffered in Afghanistan have taken place on Obamas watch, not because he was pursuing a strategy that he sincerely believed to be in Americas interest, but because he cynically calculated that sending Americans to die in a useless campaign (as he assessed it) would benefit him politically. This is a scandal approximately a billion times more newsworthy than the Christie administrations closing a lane on a bridge. -John Hinderraker, Powerline, Jan 2014

Now the persona is evaporating, under the impact of laughter on the one hand and sheer horror at the results of Obama's incompetence (in health care today, in foreign policy next week) And that's a good thing. Because nothing was being done, and nothing was ever going to be done. There's a certain value in knowing how bad things actually are. JR Dunn, American Thinker, Dec 2013

He can blame Republicans in Congress all he likes and get away with it because congressional Republicans are the worst. But the fact remains that I have spent the majority of this man's presidency watching bad things happen, then hearing a thoughtful speech about how we gotta make sure the bad things never happen again, and then watching as nothing gets done. Next time there's an election, I want Nate Silver to analyze the data and tell me who to vote for so that I don't end up casting my ballot for a very eloquent hat stand. -GQ after placing Zero 17th on its list of least influential people, behind Anthony Weiner and Jodi Arias

It was always about power  gaining it and keeping it for the Democratic party and the central government. It was based on lies about the preceding system and sold on lies about its consequences. -Mona Charen, on Obamacare, 2013

I was a constitutional law professor, which means unlike the current president I actually respect the Constitution. -B Obama

I wouldnt be surprised if President Obama learned Osama bin Laden had been killed when he saw himself announce it on television. -- Jon Stewart

No matter how we reform healthcare, we will keep this promise . if you like your healthcare plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan. Period. No one will take it away. No matter what. -Obama 2009

We were working in a very very nimble hyper-consumer-focused way, all fused in this kind of maelstrom of pizza, Mountain Dew, and all-nighters . . . and, you know, idealism. That kind of led to the magic that was produced. - from Mark Steyns column quoting from August 2010 , Todd Park, the chief technology officer of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and TechCrunchs with his delirious preview of Obamacares Healthcare.gov disastrous website

Your policy doesnt include maternity care. -Answer from his agent after a 61 yr old male Powerline reader in good health asked why his cancelled health insurance was not compliant with Obamacare and being discontinued.

They have a problem and they won't level about it. One suspects that they will get it fixed, more or less. It is just technology, after all. But the imperious attitude that is in their DNA. They can't fix it. Don't want to. Don't believe it needs fixing. -G Norman, Weekly Std. on the rollout of ObamaCare in Oct 2013

The world knows a lot about us, and in ways removed from specific military actions. Their elites come here, and increasingly their middle class. They know our unemployment problemit's not a secret. They take the train from New York to Washington and see the abandoned factories. They know about our budget problems, they know who holds our bonds. They read about the kids who are bored so they killed the visiting Australian baseball player, and the kids so bored they killed a World War II veteran. They read about the state legislator who became a hero for defending late-term abortionsthey see the fawning interviews. They go home with the story of the guy who spent his time watching violent videos and then, amazingly, acted out his visions of violence at the Washington Navy Yard. They notice our mass killings are no more than two-day stories. And of course it isn't only "the world" that sees thisAmericans see it. And they are worried about their country. Deep down they, too, wonder if we are still a great nation or will be able to remain one. They think our economy is in a shambles and our government incapable, at the moment, of creating the conditions that will allow it to come back. They fear our culture is rotting our children's heads. -Peggy Noonan on Obama's America 9/2013

The content of Mondays hyperpartisan speech was par for your hyperpartisan presidency, but the timing marked a new low. Let me be clear: Have you neither decency nor shame? -NY Post's Michael Goodwin on Obama's speech after a gunman had opened fire at the Washington Navy Yard he denounced Republicans'

Go away. Just Go Away. If that is asking too much, then please, please be quiet! For America and for decency. - NY Post's Michael Goodwin on Obama's speech after a gunman had opened fire at the Washington Navy Yard he denounced Republicans'

[H]e has damaged his presidency and weakened the nations standing in the world. It has been one of the more stunning and inexplicable displays of presidential incompetence that Ive ever witnessed. The failure cuts straight to the heart of a perpetual criticism of the Obama White House: that the President thinks he can do foreign policy all by his lonesome. This has been the most closely held American foreign-policy-making process since Nixon and Kissinger, only theres no Kissinger. There is no éminence grisethink of someone like Brent Scowcroftwho can say to Obama with real power and credibility, Mr. President, youre doing the wrong thing here.[H]e has done himself, and the nation, great and unnecessary harm. The road back to credibility and respect will be extremely difficult. -liberal Joe Klein, Time Mag. after Obama's Syrian policy failure

...the correct answer would be, No, we stayed within our lane and Im assuring you we did not spy on members of Congress. -Senator Mark Kirk of Illinois after hearing the answer to his question to Attorney General Holder if hes spying on members of Congress and thereby giving the executive branch leverage over the legislative branch. Eric Holder had answered:With all due respect, senator, I dont think this is an appropriate setting for me to discuss that issue.

This administrations management of the Obama Internal Revenue Service scandal so far consists of a slow-walking, rolling disclosure of facts; equal parts equivocation, amnesia and indignation from IRS witnesses; deer-in-the-headlights non-responses by the White House press secretary; parsed, lawyerly statements from the president himself; and now one of the central key players is taking the Fifth. And all this comes from what the president claimed would be the most transparent administration ever   Ed Rogers, Wash Post, May 2013

Under the Permanent Campaign Shimmy, the president identifies a problem. Then he declines to come up with a proposal to address the problem. Then he comes up with a vague-but-politically-convenient concept that doesnt address the problem (lets raise taxes on the rich). Then he goes around the country blasting the opposition for not having as politically popular a concept. Then he returns to Washington and congratulates himself for being the only serious and substantive person in town. -New York Times columnist David Brooks, Feb 2013

To put fine point on the matter, our president terrifies me, even though during most of my life I have been a liberal Democrat and voted for him in his first election. If viewed honestly his first term has been an unmitigated disaster. The national debt is at an historic high. So is unemployment. Despite these sad, undeniable facts, he was elected to another term. That of course is typical of his history for much of his life. He is a master politician of the Chicago school and yet a disaster as a manager and practical leader. -Arnold S. Trebach, writing in the American Spectator, Jan. 2013

President Obama told the nation in his June 14 economic policy address in Cleveland that his economic policy plans for a second term would "create strong sustained growth; pay down our long term debt; and most of all generate good, middle-class jobs ." He then spent almost an hour describing policies that would do just the opposite. -Peter Ferrara, American Spectator, June, 2012

He lies to us constantly about who he is. Not in the way most politicians lie, spinning and shading events with self-serving half-truths. He lies with the arrogant bravado of a con man messiah. My grandfather was tortured by the British. My parents met because of the march in Selma. My white girlfriend wanted to be black. These arent lies that were forced out of him in a rough moment to defend himself from controversy  like the lie about terrorist William Ayers being just a guy in the neighborhood, or the one about never having heard the hate-mongering of Jeremiah Wright  these are intentionally crafted falsehoods. They were meant to do exactly what they did: to recreate Obama in the image of the black savior leftists had been waiting for, the man who would relieve them of the disfiguring guilt arising from their dreadful history of racism and justify the disastrous havoc their policies have wreaked on African-Americans. -Andrew Klavan, PJ Media, June 2012.

Are you better off today than you were $4 trillion ago? -former presidential candidate Gov. Rick Perry

Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said the Obama administration is not claiming victory in Iraq. Thats good, because the administration had nothing to do with it. -Wash Times Ed., Dec 2011.

Well, then, what the hell are we paying you for? -NJ Gov. Chris Christy after Obama said he knew the Congressional super committee was doomed for failure, so he didnt get involved

The fact that we are here today to debate raising Americas debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. Government cant pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Governments reckless fiscal policies. Increasing Americas debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that the buck stops here. Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better. -Obama 2006

He is the Man Who Won't Listen to Anybody, so why should anybody listen to him? New York Post's Michael Goodwin after turning off the TV during an Obama speech.

Americans are desperately seeking an answer to a simple question: why does President Obama appear to be so un-American? The term un-American here is not synonymous with anti-American (though Obama has been that on occasion); instead, it merely signifies that President Obama is unconcerned with typical American principles and traditions. He sees capitalism as selfish and evil, religion as dangerous and oppressive; he sees the Constitution as antiquated and entrepreneurialism as exploitative. He is the representative of the Fareed Zakaria ideology at work, celebrating the post-American world." Benjamin Shapiro on why the new book by Jerome Corsi (Wheres the Birth Certificate? ) tops Amazon's best seller list week after week

Imagine that the government decided they were going to take care of every starving person on the street once and for all. To do this, the government officials go to the CEO of a popular chain restaurant that has locations across the US. The official tells the CEO that pretty soon, every homeless/hungry person will be coming in to his/her restaurant for a free meal. The government helpfully says they will foot the bill for this meal, of course via everyones tax dollars. The CEO feels like maybe this is a good idea to help feed the hungry and responds in kind, saying Great! To cover our costs, that meal will be $10. Heres where things start to get ugly. The government official says, We dont really care what your costs are. Well pay you $7 for that meal, and youll have to figure out how to make up the rest. Blogger kevindujan01 posting at Hillbuzz relating his Doctor's analogy on Obamacare

The moral code, the moral compass of the state-controlled media is something to behold. Now, some of you may not know the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner hosted a state dinner last night for Hu Jintao of China. Hu Jintao is holding the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner in prison in China. Not making it up. The 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner hosted a dinner for the guy holding the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner in prison, and the media does not get the irony of this at all. They're too busy running around chasing Sarah Palin and radio talk show hosts over "civility."

Rush Limbaugh on his radio show, Jan. 20, 2011.

The notion that somehow me saying maybe you should be taxed more like your secretary when you're pulling home a billion dollars...I don't think is me being extremist or me being antibusiness - Obama in need of a grammar lesson

For some inexplicable reason, Mr. Obama welcomes the decline of America's role on the international stage. It is his most notable accomplishment. -Wash Times Ed. Nov 2010

If you voted for Obama, please turn around and leave! You have proven that you are not responsible enough to own a firearm! sign posted on door of The Southwest Shooting Authority in Pinetop, Ariz.

Occam's razor suggests that Obama is a mere conformist--someone who absorbed every left-wing platitude he encountered in college and never seems to have seriously questioned any of them -WSJ's James Taranto

When I see the media and the entire establishment on the left lay down and become cult-like and not examine who he is, what he's done, and not really examine what he says, but just praise him because of how he says it, my antenna go up.

If we're going to convince the American people what's about to happen to them is as disastrous as anything in their lives in peacetime, we're going to have to discuss philosophy with them. We are going to have to talk about principles

-Rush Limbaugh on Obama

Nothing wakened their instincts more than the administration's insistence on its health-care billits whiff of totalitarian will, its secretiveness, its display of cold assurance that the new president's social agenda trumped everything.

But it was about far more than health-care reform, or joblessness, or the great ideological divide between the president and the rest of the country. It was about an accumulation of facts quietly taken in that told Americans that the man they had sent to the White House had neither the character or the capacity to lead the country.

-Dorothy Rabinowitz

In the Nineties, the culture wars were over God, guns and gays. The overreach of the statists has added a fourth G: Government itself is now a front in the culture war, and a battle of the most primal kind. Is the United States a republic of limited government with a presumption in favor of individual liberty? Or is it just like any other western nation in which a permanent political class knows whats best for its subjects? -Mark Syeyn on the 2010 Midterm Elections

If the book is accurate it is some of the most cold-blooded, cynical, grotesquely political manipulation of national security that I think weve ever seen....The notion that a President would say that in that kind of callous and just utterly robotic way, I think is yet further indication that Obama is simply not qualified to be Commander-in-Chief -John Bolton on Foxnews when asked to comment on Woodward's book, Obama's Wars

Strange but true: President Obama told NASA administrator Charles Bolden that his highest priority should be "to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science ... and math and engineering."

... the real roots of Mr. Obama's economic problems are intellectual and political. The Administration rejected marginal-rate tax cuts that worked in the 1960s and 1980s because they would have helped the rich, in favor of a Keynesian spending binge that has stimulated little except government. More broadly, Democrats purposely used the recession as a political opening to redistribute income, reverse the free-market reforms of the Reagan era, and put government at the commanding heights of economic decision-making. - Wall St Journal Editorial on Obama's failed economic policies

How they see the world.....

-- Resistance to the vast expansion of government power, intrusiveness and debt, as represented by the Tea Party movement? Why, racist resentment toward a black president. -- Disgust and alarm with the federal government's unwillingness to curb illegal immigration, as crystallized in the Arizona law? Nativism. -- Opposition to the most radical redefinition of marriage in human history, as expressed in Proposition 8 in California? Homophobia. -- Opposition to a 15-story Islamic center and mosque near Ground Zero? Islamophobia.

-Charles Krauthammer, Aug 2010

For the first time in American history, we have a man in the White House who consciously and brazenly disregards his oath of office to protect and defend the Constitution. That's why I say the greatest threat to our Constitution, our safety and our liberties, is internal. Our president is an enemy of our Constitution, and, as such, he is a danger to our safety, our security and our personal freedoms. - Wash. Times' Tom Tancredo, July 2010

He is Mr. Mass Destruction. I mean he is a human destroyer. This guy has spent his way into oblivion and we don't have a budget. He is surrounded by a bunch of complete incompetents, led by himself. -Rant by Howard Davidowitz

The State of the Union could have been written by a computer program. All the now familiar Obama furniture was in the room: the mock outrage at them, the psychodramatic first-person boasting (as in, I will oppose.., I will not work with , I will decline , I will not stand by , I will not cede , I will not walk away , I will not back down , I will not go back ); the now customary rear-view-mirror jab at his fading predecessor; the monotonous promising that something is so bad that we must have a new program for it (each year the same threat, the same solution, the same failure); and the silence about the Obama legacy of stimulus, debt, and ObamaCare. Victor Davis Hanson, PJ Media, Jan 2011

Despite the fact that he has some of the lowest approval ratings among recent presidents, history will see Barack Obama as the source of America s resurrection. Barack Obama has plunged the country into levels of debt that we could not have previously imagined; his efforts to nationalize health care have been met with fierce resistance nationwide; TARP bailouts and stimulus spending have shown little positive effect on the national economy; unemployment is unacceptably high and looks to remain that way for most of a decade; legacy entitlement programs have ballooned to unsustainable levels, and there is a seething anger in the populace.

Thats why Barack Obama is such a good thing for America .

Obama is the symbol of a creeping liberalism that has infected our society like a cancer for the last 100 years. Just as Hitler is the face of fascism, Obama will go down in history as the face of unchecked liberalism. The cancer metastasized to the point where it could no longer be ignored.

Literally millions of Americans have had enough. Theyre organizing, theyre studying the Constitution and the Federalist Papers, theyre reading history and case law, theyre showing up at rallies and meetings, and a slew of conservative candidates are throwing their hats into the ring. Is there a revolution brewing? Yes, in the sense that there is a keen awareness that our priorities and sensibilities must be radically re-structured. Will it be a violent revolution? No. It will be done through the interpretation of the original document that has guided us for 220 years - the Constitution. Just as the pendulum swung to embrace political correctness and liberalism, there will be a backlash, a complete repudiation of a hundred years of nonsense. A hundred years from now, history will perceive the year 2010 as the time when America got back on the right track. And for that, we can thank Barack Hussein Obama.

-Gary Hubbell, Aspen Times Weekly February 2010

In recent months, a lot of Americans have said to me that they had no idea the new president would feel so "weird." But, in fact, he's not weird. True, he's not, even in Democratic terms, a political figure  as, say, Clinton or Biden are. Instead, he's the product of the broader culture: There are millions of people like Barack Obama, the eternal students of a vast lethargic transnational campus for whom global compassion and the multicultural pose are merely the modish gloss on a cult of radical grandiose narcissism. As someone once said, "We are the ones we've been waiting for." When you've spent that long waiting in line for yourself, it's bound to be a disappointment.

Mark Steyn, Jun 2010.

"Don't make excuses. Take responsibility not just for your successes; take responsibility where you fall short as well." As many immediately noted, this was odd advice from a man who would put the blame for the hitch in his golf swing on eight years of George W. Bush.

-Jonah Goldberg commenting on an Obama speech to high school students

From the earliest days of the campaign, the Obama movement contained two political time bombs: First, the curse of absurdly high expectations (first were going to change Iowa! Then were going to change America! Then were going to change the world!) And second, electing to office a president with no governing or leadership experience. . . And now the chickens are also coming home to roost on the leadership and competency question. The White House is continually slow-off-the-mark, reactive, defensive, and unsure of its footing, i.e., it appears in over its head. ...It will be difficult (if not impossible) to re-build the Obama brand, because it never really existed as a tangible thing in the first place.

Barack Obama's remarkable powers of oratory are well known: In support of Chicago's Olympic bid, he flew into Copenhagen to give a heartwarming speech about himself, and they gave the games to Rio. He flew into Boston to support Martha Coakley's bid for the U.S. Senate, and Massachusetts voters gave Ted Kennedy's seat to a Republican. In the first year of his presidency, he gave a gazillion speeches on health care "reform" and drove support for his proposals to basement level, leaving Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to ram it down the throats of the American people through sheer parliamentary muscle.

Mark Steyn, May 2010

.. I hereby declare that I would rather be ruled by the Tea Party than by the Democratic Party, and I would rather have Sarah Palin sitting in the Oval Office than Barack Obama

-Conservative Norman B. Podhoretz, Mar, 2010

With the House's climactic vote on ObamaCare tomorrow, Democrats are on the cusp of a profound and historic mistake, comparable in our view to the Smoot-Hawley tariff and FDR's National Industrial Recovery Act.

-Wall St. Journal Editorial Mar 20, 2010

You break it, you own it.

-Wall St. Journal Editorial Mar 22, 2010

It revealed his primary weakness in speaking of health care, which is a tendency to dodge, obfuscate and mislead. He grows testy when challenged. It revealed what the president doesn't want revealed, which is that he doesn't want to reveal much about his plan

The Founding Fathers, far from being ideologues, were not even politicians. They were an assortment of businessmen, writers, teachers, planters; men, in short, who knew something of the world, which is to say, of Human Nature. Their struggle to draft a set of rules acceptable to each other was based on the assumption that we human beings, in the mass, are no damned goodthat we are biddable, easily confused, and that we may easily be motivated by a Politician, which is to say, a huckster, mounting a soapbox and inflaming our passions.

David Mamet, Jan 2013

He is our first post-American president

-John Bolton, WSJ Mar 2010

The good news is that he recognizes his mistakes and is going to try again.

White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer explaining that Obama got all the policies right but just didn't explain them well.

The central contradiction in modern liberal politics is that Otto von Bismarck's entitlement state for cradle to grave financial security is no longer affordable. The model has reached the limit of its ability to tax private income and still allow enough economic growth to finance its transfer payments. ... You can see this in bankrupt Greece, where government spends 52% of GDP; or in California and New York, where the government-employee unions have pushed tax rates to punishing levels and the states still can't pay their bills. Americans can see that this is where Mr. Obama's agenda is also taking Washington, and this is why they are rejecting it.

The Obama administration resembles nothing so much as a big house in the suburbs where the parents are away for the weekend.

-Greg Lewis, American Thinker

The palpable whiff given off by the White House inner circle is that they're the last people on the planet still besotted by Barack Obama, and that they're having such a cool time starring in their own reality-show remake of "The West Wing" they can only conceive of the public  and, indeed, the world  as crowd-scene extras in "The Barack Obama Show." They expect you to cheer and wave flags when the floor manager tells you to, but the notion that, in return, he should be able to persuade you of the merits of his policies seems entirely to have eluded them

- Mark Steyn, Feb 5, 2010

Obama says he's not a Bolshevik, and he says he's not an ideologue. That leaves one other possibility, he's an idiot, a full-fledged idiot..

-Rush Limbaugh, Feb 4, 2010

The president has a reality problem. He's crafted a fantasy universe where he and his friends can live unperturbed by our center-right country, comforted by just-so stories. The rest of us can only, like Justice Alito, crinkle our noses and mutter, "Not true."

There's usually a reason for a presidency lasting a single term, as Mr. Obama's slow-motion train wreck is demonstrating

-Wash. Times editorial on the eve of Obama's first state-of-the-union address

You know, this is an amazing week. Massachusetts goes Republican, health care dies and the Supreme Court unshackles the First Amendment. It's the best week I've had since spring break in medical school -- and I don't even remember it [laughter from other panelists].

You want a competent chief executive with a deep and shrewd sense of the people. Americans want him to be on the same page as they are. But he's on a different page, and he may in fact be reading a different book.

- Peggy Noonan

The system worked !!!

Secretary of homeland security Janet Napolitano after a would be suicide bomber's failed detonater and passenger heroics saved a Christmas '09 Northwest flight. The jihadist paid cash, bought a one-way ticket, had no passport, checked no luggage on a transoceanic flight, and his father had warned U.S. authorities about his son. He was nonetheless allowed to fly.

On the Nobel Peace Prize

The most popular headline at the Real Clear Politics Web site the other day was: "Is Obama Becoming A Joke?" With brilliant comedic timing, the very next morning the Norwegians gave him the Nobel Peace Prize.

-Mark Steyn

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has embarrassed itself and cheapened a great award that had real meaning. ...

The members of the committee have also put the young American president in a terrible place. They make it look like all the talk of "The One," the heartthrob of the European elite, the darling of the international left, is true. They make him look prefabricated and inauthentic, an empty structure held up by essentially silly people.

-Peggy Noonan

He is an American president queasy about the projection of American power. He is an American president who rejects the notion of American exceptionalism. He is an American president eagerly in pursuit of legitimacy to be granted him not by those who voted for him but by those who do not cast a vote and who chafe at American leadership. It is his devout wish that America become one of many nations, influencing the world indirectly or not influencing it at all, rather than "the indispensable nation," as Madeleine Albright characterized it. He is the encapsulation, the representative, the wish fulfillment, the very embodiment, of the multilateralist impulse. He is, almost literally, a dream come true for the sorts of people who treasure and value the Nobel Peace Prize.

- John Podhoretz

George Bush liberates 50 million Muslims. Ronald Reagan liberates hundreds of millions of Europeans, saves parts of Latin America. Any awards? No. Just derision. Obama gives speeches trashing his own country and he gets a prize for it.

-Rush Limbaugh

The award of this years Nobel peace prize to President Obama will be met with widespread incredulity, consternation in many capitals and probably deep embarrassment by the President himself. ,,, Rarely has an award had such an obvious political and partisan intent. ...Instead, the prize risks looking preposterous in its claims, patronising in its intentions and demeaning in its attempt to build up a man who has barely begun his period in office, let alone achieved any tangible outcome for peace. ... The pretext for the prize was Mr Obamas decision to strengthen international diplomacy and co-operation between peoples.

-Michael Binyon, London Times

"..like Obama getting the Nobel Prize."

-David Beckham's coach, Fabio Capello after Beckman was named "man of the match" in England's World Cup qualifying soccer game this week despite playing for just 30 minutes.

Obama has proved his powers of observation and logical deduction are not even up to the level of an average, open minded, skeptical thinker. Instead, Barack is what Eric Hoffer termed a True Believer, that isa radical zealot of permanently fixed bias. In other words, his contemplations are so bereft of intellectual rigor or logical structure that he doesnt really rate as a thinker at all. Instead, his leftist declarations are merely belched up bromides redounding of the staccato cackle of a high-profile parrot. He dramatically trumpets a fistful of progressive bumper stickers every time he pontificates. To sum up, Obama unthinkingly regurgitates bygone leftist notions so thoroughly discredited that only a pseudo-spiritual affiliation can possibly explain his unthinking adherence to a fact-blind ideology. Obamas religious affiliation is a secular, leftist humanism best described as Marxism. Since he has no ability for self-derived thought and cannot deviate from this primitive, materialist world-view, he is perhaps the most dangerous president ever foisted upon the American people.

- Kelly O'Connell, Canada Free Press, December, 2009

School dismissal time in Chicago triggers a massive mobilization of security forces across the South and West Sides, to try to keep students from shooting one another or being shot by older gang members. Police officers in bulletproof vests ring the most violence-prone schools, and the Chicago Transit Authority rejiggers its bus schedules to try to make sure that students dont have to walk even half a block before boarding a bus.

-H MacDonald in an article commenting on Community Organizer Obama's home turf

Public approval ratings of Barack Obama may be falling quickly right nowbut his rating of the American public is probably falling even faster.

-Arthur C. Brooks, Wall St. Journal, Aug 2009

Obama doesn't lie. He implies, he misdirects, he misleads -- so fluidly and incessantly that he risks transmuting eloquence into mere slickness.

Slickness wasn't fatal to "Slick Willie" Clinton because he possessed a winning, near irresistible charm. Obama's persona is more cool, distant, imperial. The charming scoundrel can get away with endless deception; the righteous redeemer cannot.

he's a phony, knows nothing about economics, is historically illiterate, and woefully small minded for the size of the task

-Geoffrey P. Hunt, American Thinker, Aug 2009

"...the one unifying theme of his presidency so far has been Obama's relentless campaigning for a job he already has.

-Jonah Goldberg, July 2009.

The worst thing that could happen, from the standpoint of those seeking more government power over the economy, would be for the economy to begin recovering on its own while months were being spent debating the need for a "stimulus" bill.

-Thomas Sowell, Sept 2009

"...by a 2-1 margin, voters believe that no matter how bad things are Congress can always make matters worse"

- Scott Rasmussen after polling on Obamacare in Aug 2009

The mainstream perception that conservatives are close-minded and dogmatic while liberals are open-minded and free- thinking has it almost exactly backward. Liberal dogma is settled: The government should do good, where it can, whenever it can. That is President Obama's idea of pragmatism and bipartisanship: He's open to all ideas, from either side of the aisle, about how best to expand government and get the state more involved in our lives.

-Jonah Goldberg, May, 2009.

Remarkably, there are still four justices on the Supreme Court [who] would have taken the radical step of prohibiting the advertising and satellite television showing of a documentary movie about a political candidate simply because a corporation had a role in financing its production or distribution. Name me a movie or book that doesnt receive such corporate support. This is a truly radical position, and Justice Kagan has now joined them.

-Bradley Smith, National Review Online, June, 2012

America is on an unsustainable fiscal path that threatens our future. ...The consequences of all this will not be benign. A world saturated with U.S. currency will eventually look elsewhere to invest, causing the dollar's value to drop; foreign creditors, their confidence shaken by our fiscal profligacy, will demand higher payments to keep holding our debt. The net effect will be "stagflation," that pernicious combination of slower growth, higher inflation and interest rates, and lower living standards Americans suffered through in the 1970s.

Evan Bayh Dem Sen Indiana, Sep 2009

Conservatives are taking too much solace in the precipitous drop in Barack Obama's approval ratings, and too many of us are overconfident that his administration is merely a replay of the hapless presidency of Jimmy Carter that was easily swept out in a landslide election ... Today's situation is far different, far more conducive to our political adversary's political power, than that which faced Carter. And Obama is an entirely different breed of cat. He's more ruthless, more tactically savvy, and has far more dangerous objectives.

- Quin Hillyer, Sept 2009

...do they have an aspiration that they dare not speak? Do they hope state capitalism will be irreversible -- that wherever government has asserted the primacy of politics, the primacy will be permanent?

-George Will, Aug 2009.

The superficiality, the unseriousness, the hubris, the obliviousness to post-9/11 realities: They were trademarks of the Obama campaign, and they are the tattoos on his governance

- Michelle Malkin on the White House-engineered photo-op of low-flying Air Force aircraft that caused terror in New York City

Orwellian NEWSPEAK from "The Party"

"The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. ... We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?"

-- [O'Brien speaking to Winston] George Orwell, "1984"

To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies.

- Orwell on Doublethink, "1984"

When Obama read George Orwells 1984, he apparently thought it was a training manual, not a warning

.-Investors Business Daily OpEd on the transparency of the administration, Aug 11, 2014.

"...the progress report reveals that the website is functioning more than 90% of the timeexcluding periods when it is shut down for maintenance. "

-WSJ quoting an Obamacare metric of the Obama Administration

"I think it's fair to say that during the course of my Presidency I have bent over backwards to work with the Republican Party, and have purposely kept my rhetoric down. I think I'm pretty well known for being a calm guy. Sometimes people think I'm too calm."

-Obama-after the government shutdown in October, 2013

Raising the debt ceiling, which has been done over a hundred times, does not increase our debt

-Obama, Sept 2013

the law prohibiting the disclosure of confidential tax returns also prevents disclosure of information about who disclosed them

- National Organization for Marriage chairman, John Eastman on the "Orwellian" response he got from the IRS to his request for who leaked their confidential tax information to liberal groups.- from Peggy Noonan's WSJ column, June 2013

We have to pass the [health care] bill so that you can find out what is in it.

-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, March, 2010.

Turnabout fair play?

it is a "fundamental strategic mistake" to believe "there is any possibility in the lifetime of anyone here of having the Iraqis get together, have a unity government in Baghdad that pulls the country together. That will not happen..."

- Joe Biden 2007 bashing Bush.

"one of the great achievements of this administration" may well be a democratic Iraq. "You're going to see a stable government in Iraq that is actually moving toward a representative government. . . . I've been impressed how they have been deciding to use the political process rather than guns to settle their differences."

-Joe Biden Feb. 2010 [now taking credit for Bush's achievments]

"..the era of Big Government is over."

- Bill Clinton's 1996 State of the Union address

"There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there. Since we can't keep track of all of them here at the White House, we're asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov."

-Big Brother

New Transparancy, Obama style !!

"As administrator, I will ensure EPA's efforts to address the environmental crises of today are rooted in three fundamental values: science-based policies and program, adherence to the rule of law, and overwhelming transparency." - Environmental Protection Agency Administrator, Lisa Jackson

"...the days of science taking a backseat to ideology are over." - Obama

; Although I did not use the word 'terrorism,' I referred to 'man-caused' disasters. That is perhaps only a nuance, but it demonstrates that we want to move away from the politics of fear toward a policy of being prepared for all risks that can occur.

-Janet Napolitano when asked why the word "terrorism" never passed her lips during her first Congressional testimony as Secretary

The Administration [ie The Party] has stopped using the phrase, and I think that speaks for itself. I have not heard it used. I have not gotten any directive about using it or not using it. It is just not being used.

- Hillary Clinton on the the phrase "war on terrorism" [now an "overseas contingency operations"]

The Obama administration is removing terms such as "jihad" and "Islamic extremism" from the U.S. National Security Strategy in an attempt to convince Muslim countries that America doesn't view them solely through the lens of counterterrorism

-Washinton Times, Apr 2010

The Constitution enumerates three requirements of those who would be president (they must be natural-born citizens, at least 35 and a resident within the country for 14 years) and now the government's thrashing about in the economy imposes a fourth: Presidents must be able to speak pluperfect nonsense with a straight face, lest the country understand what the government is doing.

So, the next time you hear the phrase, 'social justice', take time to question the one who is using it.... chances are they have no idea that the vision of justice that has taken their hearts captive was perpetrated by a terrorist who is using their good will to spread his hatred and to bring forth a more authoritative government where the individual is held captive to a few elitists with ultimate power.

The origins of warmism lie in a cocktail of ideas which includes anti-industrial nature worship, post-colonial guilt, a post-Enlightenment belief in scientists as a new priesthood of the truth, a hatred of population growth, a revulsion against the widespread increase in wealth and a belief in world government.

-Charles Moore, The Telegraph, April 8, 2014

Scientists need to get some broader based support, to capture the publics imagination that, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we may have each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.

- Alarmist Steve Schneider, admitting to global warming fraud.

...the EPA projects that this proposed rule will result in negligible CO2 emission changes, quantified benefits, and costs by 2022.

- WSJ Ed. on EPA's rule on new coal fired power plants effectively banning coal from their choice of fuels.

This is, in my view, the biggest scandal in the history of science. I cant think of any competitor that could even come close.

John Hinderaker of Powerline.com on the discovery that researchers are cooking the data-- consistently altering past temperature records to make the present look warmer by comparison.

How much should we spend on climate change in order to have no effect on climate change?

-Wall Street Journal's Holman Jenkins

This is as good a way to get rid of them as any.

- Charles Wurster, chief scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund, after being told that banning DDT would probably result in millions of deaths

We've got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we'll be doing the right thing, in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.

-Former Colorado Sen. Tim Wirth

A religion is what the faith in catastrophic man-made global warming has become. It is now a tissue of assertions impervious to evidence, assertions which everything, including a historic blizzard, supposedly confirms and nothing, not even the absence of warming, can falsify. - George Will, Feb 2010.

We cannot allow unelected bureaucrats with political agendas to use falsified data to regulate American industry and drive our economy into the ground.

-Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli in a petition to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to reconsider "finding" that carbon dioxide creates an endangerment for human health. Feb 2010.

The response to this among the defenders of Mr. Mann and his circle has been that even if they did disparage doubters and exclude contrary points of view, theirs is still the best climate science we've got. The proof for this is circular. It's the best, we're told, because it's the most-published and most-citedin that same peer-reviewed literature.

Even so, by rigging the rules, they've made it impossible to know how good it really is. And then, one is left to wonder why they felt the need to rig the game in the first place, if their science is as robust as they claim. If there's an innocent explanation for that, we'd love to hear it.

-Wall St. Journal editorial on Climategate

Global warming was an academic Ponzi scheme. Its leading proponents were mini-Madoffs, peddling a vision of global catastrophe to gullible activists, bureaucrats and policymakers. The vision was so vast, the fear it inspired so pervasive, that it seized popular imagination, aided ably by hucksters like former Vice President Al Gore and his science-fiction feature film "An Inconvenient Truth." But like any Ponzi scheme, global warming only worked if everyone kept investing and no one looked at the books. Once the truth came out - of manipulated findings, phony data, rigged peer-review processes and intimidation of skeptics - the scheme began to collapse.

Yet even as the edifice comes down, the adherents of the orthodoxy say that there is nothing to see, that this is all a distraction from the business at hand, that there is still no time to lose, full steam (or solar power) ahead. But it is far too late for that. The veil has been pierced, the myth revealed, the scales have fallen from the people's eyes. The pagan priests are fleeing the temple, their sacred idols are being pulled down, their holy works renounced. Their god, finally, is dead

-Washington Times editorial on Climategate - Dec 4, 2009

What separates a scientific claim from mere opinion is its ability to be tested by experiment. No true scientist objects to having his theories verified; the charlatan is the one with something to hide. Not surprisingly, purveyors of global warming have proved anything but open.... ...Many of those involved in purported climate science seem more preoccupied with advancing a leftist, anti-business legislative agenda than respecting the integrity of the scientific method. It's obvious why. Their cataclysmic scare stories are unable to withstand scrutiny. By deleting e-mails and using tricks to hide the inconvenient decline in global temperatures, the climate alarmists prove to be not men of science, but ordinary frauds.

-Washington Times editorial Jul 2010

... never in peacetime history has the government-media-academic complex been in such sustained propagandistic lockstep about any subject.

- George Will, Dec 2009.

On climate, the public has been misinformed and not informed ... the foundation of a democracy is an informed public, which obviously means an honestly informed public.

- NASA's Global Warming alarmist Hansen , June 2006. [Although at the time we all thought Hansen was referring to his theories, but later, Hansen's NASA announced that October 2008 was the hottest October on record, in fact he used data recorded in Siberia during Septemberand then tried to cover their error with even absurd excuses that reveal further just how far their studies depart from accepted scientific inquiry. Since NASA is subject to Freedom of Information queries, he may have been left out of the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) emails.

Over the coming few years, as the costs of global warming policies mount and the evidence of a crisis continues to collapse, perhaps it will become socially permissible for people to start thinking for themselves again

Do scientists use data to test theories, or do they use theories to test data? Scientists will claim the former, but here we have scientists who cling to the theory so tightly that they reject the data. Thats not science; its religious belief

President Obama is calling the climate bill that the House passed last week an "extraordinary" achievement, and so it is. The 1,200-page wonder manages the supreme feat of being both hugely expensive while doing almost nothing to reduce carbon emissions

-Wall St Journal Editorial - July 3, 2009

Here they go again -- our faithful representatives in Washington, that is. They're about to pass, without reading its 1,200-plus pages, an incredibly expensive and destructive cap and trade bill, which has little prayer of accomplishing what it sets out to accomplish but satisfies their urgent need to pay homage to their liberal ideology and secular humanist worldview.

-David Limbaugh, June 2009 on Congress' Global Warming initiative

For how many years must the planet cool before we begin to understand that the planet is not warming?

- Geologist Dr. David Gee, Uppsala University in Sweden.

The only predictions that have been made are apocalyptic, so the hypothesis has to be accepted before it can be tested.

-James Kerian, a mechanical engineer opining on man-made global warming in the Wall St. Journal - July 2008

...as a practical matter, would be the aim of global warming policy? Our political system permits only one answer: to please the special interests that even now are gathering at the trough for subsidies in the name of climate change.

- Wall St. Journal's Holman W. Jenkins, Jr

I suppose, fundamentally, it's the fact that someone is speaking about a science that I have been very heavily involved with and have labored so hard in, and been humiliated by, in the sense that the climate is so difficult to understand, Mother Nature is so complex, and so the uncertainties are great, and then to hear someone speak with such certainty and such confidence about what the climate is going to do is -- well, I suppose I could be kind and say, it's annoying to me.

My concern is that we may be moving away from an irrational lack of concern about climate change to an equally irrational panic about it.....Many of my colleagues ask, "What's the problem? Hasn't it been a good thing to raise public concern?" The problem is that in this panic we are going to spend our money unwisely, we will take actions that are counterproductive, and we will fail to do many of those things that will benefit the environment and ourselves.

-Daniel B. Botkin, president of the Center for the Study of the Environment

Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is generally to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

When politicians and journalists declare that the science of global warming is settled, they show a regrettable ignorance about how science works.

-Nigel Calder, former editor of New Scientists

"Between the year A.D. 1 and the year 1850, volcanos and fluctuations in the heat from the sun were responsible for temperature changes, but these changes were much less pronounced than the warming caused by man-made pollution in the years since the mid-19th century. This gets to the point of the hysteria. Scientific Man in all his manufactured glory can't bear the thought that he might not, after all, be as powerful as a volcano or a solar flare. How many learned degrees does a volcano have, after all? The idea that forces of the universe greater even than Scientific Man may be responsible for the cyclical changes is unbearable. Hence 'global warming' has become the religionthe opiate, you might sayof Scientific Man, a doctrine supported by quackery, supposition and speculation, and as closely held and as ferociously defended as the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection at a gathering of devout Christians. You could ask the Rt. Rev. Al Gore, the presiding archbishop of the First Church of the Boiling Globe. The bishops and monsignors of the church treat dissent harshly, though not yet at the stake."

Wesley Pruden

A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject - Winston Churchill

The truth is, no country is going to cut its growth or consumption substantially in the light of a long-term environmental problem

-British Prime Minister Tony Blair on Kyoto - 2005

There are ominous signs that the Earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically....The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality

- Newsweek - April 28, 1975 - on the conviction that politicians would fail to prevent global COOLING and the coming Ice Age.

Terrorism

I mean, look, Bill, I'm not a bigot. You know the kind of books I've written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.

- Juan Williams' on FOX O'Reily Factor which got him fired by pseudo-humans at NPR.

Meanwhile, is it really the case that Hamas is objectively "good" at public relations? Or Hezbollah? Or Iran? Really? I just don't see it. To me, these PR operations are less "Wag the Dog" and more Baghdad Bob (the Monty Pythonesque spokesman for Saddam Hussein's regime). But instead of everyone laughing at the lies and idiocy, millions of people nod their heads in agreement.

North Korea recently sank a South Korean ship. The international reaction has been muted and sober. Turkey -- the Palestinians' new champion -- has been treating Kurdish nationalists harshly for generations; no one cares. The Russians crush Chechens, the Chinese trample Uighurs. Real genocides unfold regularly in Africa. Iran is pursuing a nuclear bomb. Hamas is openly dedicated to the destruction of Israel. So is Iran.

And yet the only villain as far as much of the world is concerned is Israel. Always Israel.

-Jonah Goldberg commenting on the world reaction to Israel's botched raid of six "humanitarian" ships bound for Gaza [June 2010]

....in dealing with terrorists, our tax dollars should pay for weapons to stop them, not lawyers to defend them.

Lowering the price to be paid by aggressors virtually guarantees more aggression.

- Thomas Sowell

---

And what changed policy was September the 11th. That changed policy. But actually, before September the 11th, this global movement with a global ideology was already in being. September the 11th was the culmination of what they wanted to do.

But actually, you know -- and this is probably where the policymakers such as myself were truly in error -- is that even before September the 11th this was happening in all sorts of different ways in different countries.

I mean, in Algeria for example, tens and tens of thousands of people lost their lives.

This movement has grown. It is there. It will latch onto any cause that it possibly can and give it a dimension of terrorism and hatred.

You can see this. You can see it in Kashmir, for example. You can see it in Chechnya, you know? You can see it in Palestine.

Now, what is its purpose?

Its purpose is to promote its ideology based on a perversion of Islam and to use any methods at all, but particularly terrorism, to do that. Because they know that the value of terrorism to them is -- as I was saying a moment or two ago -- it's not simply the act of terror, it's the chain reaction that terror brings with it.

Terrorism brings the reprisal; the reprisal brings the additional hatred; the additional hatred breeds the additional terrorism, and so on.

In a small way, we lived through that in Northern Ireland over many, many decades.

Now, what happened after September the 11th -- and this explains, I think, the president's policy but also the reason why I have taken the view and still take the view that Britain and America should remain strong allies, shoulder to shoulder, in fighting this battle, is that we are never going to succeed unless we understand they are going to fight hard.

The reason why they are doing what they are doing in Iraq at the moment -- and, yes, it's really tough as a result of it -- is because they know that if right in the center of the Middle East, in an Arab Muslim country, you've got a nonsectarian democracy -- in other words people weren't governed either by religious fanatics or secular dictators -- you've got a genuine democracy of the people: How does their ideology flourish in such circumstances?

So they have imported the terrorism into that country, preyed on whatever reactionary elements there are to boost it. And that's why we have the issue there.

That's why the Taliban are trying to come back in Afghanistan. That is why the moment it looked as if you could get progress in Israel and Palestine, it had to be stopped.

That's the moment when, as they say there was a problem in Gaza, so they realized: Well, there's a possibility now we can set Lebanon against Israel.

Now, it's a global movement. It's a global ideology.

And if there's any mistake that's ever made in these circumstances, it's if people are surprised that it's tough to fight, because you're up against an ideology that's prepared to us any means at all, including killing any number of wholly innocent people.

And I don't dispute part of the implication of your question at all in the sense that you look at what is happening in the Middle East, and what is happening in Iraq and Lebanon and Palestine, and of course there's a sense of shock and frustration and anger at what is happening, and grief at the loss of innocent lives.

But it is not a reason for walking away. It's a reason for staying the course and staying it no matter how tough it is: because the alternative is actually letting this ideology grip larger and larger numbers of people.

And it is going to be difficult. Look, we've got a problem even in our own Muslim communities in Europe who will half buy into some of the propaganda that's pushed at it -- the purpose of America is to suppress Islam; you know, Britain's joined with America in the suppression of Islam.

And one of the things we've got to stop doing is stop apologizing for our own positions. Muslims in America, as far as I'm aware of, are free to worship.

His vote against the first Gulf War was, he says, a sign of his support for the first Gulf War. Whereas his vote in favor of the Iraq war was a sign of his opposition to the Iraq war. And his vote against funding America's troops in Iraq is a sign of his support for America's men and women in uniform. On the same principle, I think the best way voters this November can demonstrate their support for John Kerry is by voting against him.'- Mark Steyn, 2004

There is a myth that though we love freedom, others don't; that our attachment to freedom is a product of our culture; that freedom, democracy, human rights, the rule of law are American values or Western values; that Afghan women were content under the lash of the Taliban; that Saddam was somehow beloved by his people; that Milosevic was Serbia's savior. Members of Congress, ours are not Western values. They are the universal values of the human spirit, and anywhere--anywhere, anytime ordinary people are given the chance to choose, the choice is the same: freedom, not tyranny; democracy, not dictatorship; the rule of law, not the rule of the secret police.- Tony Blair 2003

Then September 11 happened. And bizarrely the reaction of just about every prominent western leader was to visit a mosque: President Bush did, the Prince of Wales did, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom did, the Prime Minister of Canada did . The Premier of Ontario didnt, and so twenty Muslim community leaders had a big summit to denounce him for failing to visit a mosque-Mark Steyn 2006

Apparently due to the success of George Bush at keeping the United States secure, he, not Osama bin Laden, can now more often be the target of a relieved Left  deserving of assassination in an Alfred Knopf novel, an overseer of Nazi policies according to a U.S. senator, a buffoon, and rogue in the award-winning film of Michael Moore. Yes, because we did so well against the real enemies, we soon had the leisure to invent new imaginary ones in Bush/Cheney, Halliburton, the Patriot Act, John Ashcroft, and Scooter Libby.-Victor Davis Hanson - 2006

Hillary

No one would hire such a person to work at a McDonalds, and yet she is being considered for president of the United States. Retired Secret Service agent, Ronald Kessler on Hillary

Hillary admits she did not have textual relations with gov't servers.-Lucianne.com on her denial of wrong doing (using private emails while Sec State)

She is a dull, grating, inauthentic, over-eager, insipid elitist with ideological blinders yet no particular vision and is likely to be reduced to running on a dubious promise of experience and competence while faking idealism and hopea very common type of presidential contender in both parties, but one that almost always loses.-Yuval Levin on Hillary's negatives for 2016, Nat'l Review Online, Nov 2014

Was it because of a protest or because of guys out for a walk one night who decide to kill some Americans, what difference at this point does it make?-Hillary, Jan 2013 after asked if the Benghazi video excuse was in error was it corrected.

Because she was a liar, she was an unethical, dishonest lawyer. She conspired to violate the Constitution, the rules of the House, the rules of the committee and the rules of confidentiality.- Lifelong Democrat, Jerry Zeifman, on why he fired Hillary Clinton from the House Judiciary Committee investigating Watergate (her first job out of school)

She hasn't run a corner store, she hasn't run a state, she hasn't run a city... and the idea that she could learn to be president...as an internship, just doesn't make any sense-Mitt Romney

The only way to make a difference is to acquire power"-Hillary Clinton to a friend before starting law school

We must stop thinking of the individual and start thinking about what is best for society-Hillary as first lady.

We just can't trust the American people to make those types of choices.... Government has to make those choices for people-Hillary to Rep. Dennis Hastert in 1993 discussing her health care plan.

...a power-hungry utopian socialist who believes that political elites (i.e., she) should decide how the rest of us live- American Spectator's Steven M. Warshawsky on Hillary

Humor and such

President Coolidge, a spare and serious man, was so famously silent, the story goes, that when a woman at a dinner told him she'd made a bet she could get him to string three words together, he smiled and said, "You lose."-Peggy Noonan Feb 2011

no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.-P. J. O'Rourke

If we had known we were going to win control of the Senate, we'd have run better candidates.- then-Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, R-Kan, commenting on the enormously vulnerable class of freshman GOP senators who had been elected in 1980 and had to face voters again in 1986.

Pacifism Is A Luxury Paid For By Warriors- USMC Bumper Sticker

Liberals are certainly capable of intelligence. They may be adept at their careers and hobbies. But the problem is that their naïveté and a delusional way of looking at the world impedes common sense and street smarts ... Further, when liberals take the time to tune in, they get their "information" from progressive propaganda. And they don't question the Left's authority. ... That's the biggest problem -- not questioning the party line even though there are obvious gaps and gaffes. A big reason for this is fear. Aside from intellectual laziness, the Fear Factor makes otherwise intelligent liberals stupidly fall into line. Liberals can scare easily. .. Unarmed with either weapons or the basic facts, they have no way to defend themselves.-Robin of Berkeley, American Thinker May 2010.

Being with a woman all night never hurt no professional baseball player. It's staying up all night looking for a woman that does him in.- NY Yankee Coach Casey Stengel

Standing next to somebody who says: 'What was that?'Edward Teller when asked the best place to be if an H -bomb goes off

Freepers

Political web sites tend to attract those who have never accomplished much of anything. They suck up to a supervisor they hate. The do work they dislike doing and take orders from people they see as powerful. They see themselves as impotent pawns. But in the anonymous world of web sites they can lash out at those they fear.-Common Tator (Free Republic) - 2005

Education

Parents are voting with their feet. ... As kids continue leaving the system, we will lose teachers. Our very survival depends on having kids in D.C. schools so we'll have teachers to represent.- George Parker, head of the Washington, D.C., teachers union, commenting on the DC voucher program

The chief object of education is not to learn things but to unlearn things.G. K. Chesterton

Fraudulent grades exacerbate other problems. When a black kid has all A's and B's and makes the dean's list, what will he and his parents blame for his failure to get a decent SAT score, get into college or get a job? They're going to blame it on racial discrimination. All they'll see is that white kids with A's and B's do well and their kids with the same grades do not.- Walter Williams, 2004

On the 2008 Election

What really eats at me is that I'm constantly put in the position of not voting for or against a candidate but for or against the Constitution. For or against giving up more power and rights. For or against the road to serfdom.-Yours truly [The Raven] - Oct 30, 2008

Voters need to remember on Nov. 4 that when Marx's books are selling well and communists are happy, we are headed for trouble

- INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY editorial October 16, 2008

When the Communist Party USA approvingly says Obama would "advance progressive politics for the long term" -- run.

-Larry Elder

The sequence is always the same. High- tax, big-spending policies force the economy to lose momentum. Then growth in government spending outstrips revenues. Fiscal and trade deficits soar. Public debt, excessive taxation and unemployment follow. The central bank tries to solve the problem by printing money. International competitiveness is lost and the currency depreciates. The system stagnates. And then a frightened electorate returns conservatives to power.Adam Lerrick, professor of economics at Carnegie Mellon University - two weeks before the 2008 elections.

It may seem hardly worthwhile going to the polls to vote this election year, since ACORN and the media have already decided that Barack Obama is to be the next President of the United States.

-Thomas Sowell Oct 2008

Fannie and Freddie are fundamentally sound, they are not in danger of going under. They're not the best investments these days from the long-term standpoint going back. I think they are in good shape going forward."

- Chairman of the House Finance - Barney Frank [D ] three months before Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac collapsed and he blamed the Republicans

"Like a lot of my Democratic colleagues I was too slow to appreciate the recklessness of Fannie and Freddie. I defended their efforts to encourage affordable homeownership when in retrospect I should have heeded the concerns raised by their regulator in 2004. Frankly, I wish my Democratic colleagues would admit when it comes to Fannie and Freddie, we were wrong." - Representative Artur Davis [D] of Alabama on the mortgage/financial crisis of 2008

"[H]as there ever been a presidential nominee with a wider gap between his estimation of himself and the sum total of his lifetime achievements? "

- Charles Krauthammer

We suspect that Mr. Obama will discover that when you put "tax fairness" ahead of economic progress, you produce neither.

-Arthur Laffer

"There are two questions we will never have to ask ourselves, 'Who is this man?' and 'Can we trust this man with the presidency?'"

- Fred Thompson - Republican Convention on John McCain, Sept. 2.

"Listening to [Obama] speak, it's easy to forget that this is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or reform - not even in the state senate This is a man who can give an entire speech about the wars America is fighting, and never use the word "victory" except when he's talking about his own campaign. But when the cloud of rhetoric has passed ... when the roar of the crowd fades away ... when the stadium lights go out, and those Styrofoam Greek columns are hauled back to some studio lot - what exactly is our opponent's plan? What does he actually seek to accomplish, after he's done turning back the waters and healing the planet? The answer is to make government bigger ... take more of your money ... give you more orders from Washington ... and to reduce the strength of America in a dangerous world. America needs more energy ... our opponent is against producing it. Victory in Iraq is finally in sight ... he wants to forfeit."

-Sarah Pain, in her acceptance speech, Sept 2008

The [strategic oil] reserve should only be used in the event of an emergency, [and not] to provide a small, short-term decrease in gas prices-B Obama

White house hopeful Barack Obama called on Monday for tapping the nation's strategic oil reserve in an effort to drop soaring gas prices

- News item Aug 2008

For the first few months of the campaign, the question about Obama was: Who is he? The question now is: Who does he think he is?

-Charles Krauthammer, 2008

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Recommended reading for the aspiring progressive:

"The Black Book of the American Left" (2013), by David Horowitz:- lefty does about face - here's why

The Great Debate,' by Yuval Levin - Left (Paine) v. Right (Burke) origins in the French Revolution- In the end, Levin thinks they are both lefties

The Tyranny of Cliches, Jonah Goldberg - Good rainy day read.

The Liberty Amendments, Mark Levin - Path forward and around the left.

Never Enough: America's Limitless Welfare State,; William J. Voegeli - The problem with the left is they never define what portion of the wealth of a nation is adequate. Tomorrow's government needs to be bigger than today.

Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty, Randy E. Barnett - Excellent work focusing on the ninth amendment and putting teeth into the Constitution by preserving our natural-rights

A Citizen's Guide to the Constitution, Seth Lipsky ["It provides an education most citizens did not receive the last time they read the document back in high school or college, and one they need now" - R Richman, Am Thinker]

Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg [Can't happen here? It already did and the Democrats did it. - But they run the schools so you'll need to read about it here]

Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies-M. Stanton Evans [Simply unbelievable what the left's propaganda machine can do]

The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World -Bjorn Lomborg [the only voice on the other side of environmentalism]

Dependent on DC: The Rise of Federal Control over the Lives of Ordinary Americans - Charlotte Twight [How we got where we are....big government and incrementalism]

Men in Black - Mark Levin [The Great One is on target with the Supremes]

The New Thought Police - Tammy Bruce [ A little insight in how the libs operate the propaganda machine

Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith [Murder mystery in the USSR under Stalin with harsh details of day-to-day life in the dictatorship]

The Best Recipe - Editors of Cook's Illustrated Magazine [The authors use trial and error to optimize favorite meals.....right down to the hamburgers and spaghetti sauce...absolutely wonderful results]